I sat down, thinking about how to get a new home, raise kids, travel around and have enough to eat (oh no, food is good but I think it takes away a lot of my money). I wanted to live the live I have always envisioned while awake and dreamt of while asleep but then I remembered that I was left with less than $10 in my account. This is even not enough to get me gawks for 2 days, so I knew I had a problem.
I have worked in different places, taking different job offers at different salary ranges and always received my pay (do you think I was going to work for free? NO.) I do not get my pay late and I do not like people owing me for my job so my pays were always constant on paydays but then before payday, I was already rolling in a lot of debt. Debts large enough to consume my next paycheck leaving to go into another debt before the next paycheck and the next. I needed a solution, else I wasn’t going to live in this dream house of mine or go for the envisioned vacations I have in my head. So what do I do, how do I tackle the money problem I have?
First, I looked at why I was having little or no money in my account and then I realized I was having personal money spending inflation problem (what the hell is that). Hey, you want to know what that is. Okay, I realized that the more my income increased, there was a personal spending inflation on my spending which meant that every I bought before started noticing an increase. I realized that before I got a raise, I wasn’t subscribing for a premium service but when I got the raise, I immediately subscribed for premium service on anything and everything that had premium in it. I started buying things they were nice and wanted to let a few people know that I had the money to buy those things even if it were the last money in my account. First, I had to start watching my spending and in other to do that, I decided to pick the few things I knew I can’t do without to live a normal life after which I decided to cut out other things that were not going to make me happy over a long time but would just keep me at a position of sudden happiness, thereby returning me to my previous state after a while. With my first exercise done, I needed to deal with another problem.
Paying others first. This was another problem I had to deal with as I felt really bad paying others before paying myself. Literally, I would have to pay for subscriptions, cables, pay a lot of people and at the end of the day, I had nothing to pay myself and nothing to save. Even the good book says “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” so why would I be paying others first? I decided to start paying myself a percentage of whatever I was making and I did this because I wanted to increase my cash available.
The next thing I did was to pay all the debt I had. I started paying them from the smallest and necessary to the next and the next. So paying debt was going to be a good thing and solving it immediately will help grow your finance. After paying the debts and loans you have, you realize that you have the relief around you, and then you can start planning other things.
One final thing I worked on was not to act on impulse. Acting on impulse gets a lot of us into trouble we then find out that we could have avoided. What happens when someone comes to pitch a new product to you telling you that you just have to buy it because it is the best or because you might need it in the future and then you decide to buy it immediately without thinking through it. That is impulse purchasing based on impulses caused by marketing. When I was able to avoid these things, I was able to keep money in my hands longer than in the past.
End Note
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