Budget

How to Avoid Debt for Christmas

avoid debt for christmas

All I want for Christmas is You

Ahh Christmas is almost here.  Christmas season is the best time of the year for many, but it could also be one of the most stressful times for people who are in debt and can’t afford to buy gifts.

There is just so much pressure put on us to buy everybody and their mother a little something something for Christmas.  If you don’t, then you are just like Ebenezer Scrooge.

The pressure comes from everywhere.  There are countless Christmas commercials telling you what you should buy, there’s Christmas music everywhere (doesn’t tell you to buy stuff, but it reminds you two months in advance that it is Christmas season and that you should start getting ready), and there are also those who keep asking, “What are you getting [INSERT NAME] for Christmas?”  It is not even November yet!

Don’t get me wrong.  I love Christmas.  It is a time to get together with your family and loved ones.  Everybody seems to be happy – maybe tired of the Christmas songs, but happy – some of us gets a little break from work, and we get gifts.

Yes, I like gifts too.  The problem I have is when people get into debt just to buy somebody else a gift.

How To Track Your Spending

track your spending

Write it down!

The number one rule of wealth management is “Know where your money is going.”  Don’t look it up, it’s an unwritten rule.

Everybody knows how much money is coming in every month.  They just have to look at their paychecks.  But not everybody knows where all of that money is going.  Sure, they know about the big bills: rent/mortgage, student loan, car payment, utilities, phone, etc., but many don’t remember at the end of the month what they spent at the beginning of the month.

This causes them to always ask, “Where the hell did my money go?”

I certainly was one of these people.  Every month I used to ask myself the same two questions.  The question above and “What did I buy this month?”

I was really fed up with that routine so I decided to write down every single expense I made… I mean EVERYTHING.  After a month I looked back at my spending and was able to figure out where my money was really going.

7 Tricks Supermarkets Use To Get You To Spend More

Supermarket Tricks

Oh So Pretty… maybe I should buy more stuff!

Besides a mortgage or rent, food shopping is one of the biggest expenses in most households.  The main reason behind this expense is because we have to eat to survive.  And since most of us are too lazy to grow our own food, we love to pay for the convenience of having other people grow our food so we just have to pick it up at the store.

We’ve already covered ways you could save money food shopping, but we should also be aware of some of the tricks supermarkets use to try to get us to spend more.  Reader’s Digest put together a list of 50 supermarket tricks you still fall for, but some of them are not even tricks and the article is a series of slides (51 freaking slides) that keep you clicking around until your hands go numb. I should write about “50 website tricks to keep you on their sites longer”… making you click through 51 slides is one of them.

Here I’ll summarize the most important points in the article and add a few more that I’ve learned along the way.

10 Common Money Mistakes

Money Mistakes

Money Down The Drain

You would think that since we handle money on a daily basis we should be experts on money, but the reality is that we make a lot of money mistakes that lead to us losing our hard earned money.

If you read my story, you know that I made a lot of money mistakes that kept me living paycheck to paycheck every month.  Fortunately I have rectified some of those mistakes, but I’m still working hard to get on the path of financial independence.  Below is a list of common money mistakes I’ve made and that you should avoid.

Why You Need an Emergency Fund

Emergency Fund

Do you have an emergency fund?

Murphy’s Law is typically stated as: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. And if we don’t have an emergency fund we are risking going into debt when Murphy comes knocking on our doors.

According to the most recent Bankrate’s Financial Security Index survey, 26% of consumers have no emergency savings and another 24% have less than three months’ expenses.  I was one of these people not too long ago.

And this is not just an issue with low-income Americans, more than 25 Million middle class American families are living paycheck to paycheck and have little or no savings.  This staggering number proves that regardless of how much money we make, we have a savings problem.