First things first. You must realize that spending money works against your goal of paying off your debt. Spending money will make your situation worse. Now, I know that some things are essential. I suppose you will need a place to live and food to eat. Some of you like to wear clothes for some reason, and others demand having some sort of machine that will get you from place to place. I think you call it a car.

This is all well and good. There are things that need to be paid for. Think about it before you buy it though. Think about weather or not you really need what you are getting ready to spend money on.. There are ways to limit the amount of money you spend on necessities. Buy store brands rather than brand names. Buy chicken rather than steak. Carpool or ride your bike. Buy your clothes from thrift stores. The idea is to use as much money as possible to pay off your credit cards and other debt.

The other thing is that nasty habit of buying things on the fly. This is one of my biggest weaknesses and probably the reason it took me so long to get out of debt. When you go into a store, you probably have a small list of things you need to buy, but when you leave, there are four times the number of items in you cart.

My biggest thing is buying big items when I don’t have the money to pay for them. Like the time I got tired of my little 15 inch monitor. I had been thinking about getting one of those nice flat screen monitors for several months, but it just was not in the budget. Well one day I was at Comp USA and saw a nice monitor. It was exactly what I wanted. Well I knew I didn’t have the money really to cover it, but I went ahead and put it on the credit card anyway. It took me four months to pay that thing off. Sure I got good use out of it, but if I had waited and used the working monitor I already had, I could have saved all the interest I spent on getting it early and used that interest to pay for something else.

What I do now when I have the inkling to buy something spontaneously is ask myself a series of questions.

1. Do I really need this item? Am I really going to use or get enjoyment out of it?
2. Can I pay cash for this today, right now?
3. If I put it on the credit card, will I be able to pay it off at the end of the month so I won’t have to pay interest?

If you can’t say, “YES” to ALL of these questions honestly… Then you should not be buying the item or service. (The only exceptions are necessities like car repair, home repair, etc.)

One More Thing: Credit Cards are the spawn of Satan. I will explain in the next section.

Go back to the How to Eliminate Your Debt Page.

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