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Finally, we make it out the
door and head for the car. I quickly make sure each child is
holding someone's hand so they won't get flattened crossing the
parking lot. It's a frantic journey to the car as kids drop their
new gum, leftover change and a package or two along the way.
Then we all climb in the car
and wrestle with car seats, seat belts and, most importantly,
who gets to sit where and by whom.
Yes, the car is hot and everybody's
tired, but despite that I say, "Just a minute-- I have to
write down what I just spent." Suddenly, we are looking
for the little notebook; on the floor, in the seat, on the dashboard.
At last, we find it, stuck in between the seats under the youngest
child's car seat. After tugging and pulling, pushing and shoving,
buckling and unbuckling, we have the notebook. Now where is that
pencil? Ah, easy find. It's under the trash can on the floor.
"Let's see, now what did
I buy again? Where's the receipt? Do I add the money I got back
on my returned item or deduct it from my credit card bill? Do
I call the $.75 and $.35 a loan and write it down until it is
returned or just write it down?????"
"Yessss. I know you are
hot, I know you are hungry; I know you are tired..."
These methods might work well
for some people, but my life is complicated enough without adding
more. At times, my whole day is like the above story, so I have
so many more important ways to spend my time than constantly
searching for a notebook or writing on a chart.
What does a person do?
I once worked for a man who
had a major problem controlling his spending. Here's what finally
helped him: Every Monday morning he put a $20 bill in his wallet.
That twenty was all the money he allowed himself to spend for
the whole week. It was his lunch money, pop money and, if he
saw something at a store he really wanted, he had to buy it with
his twenty or do without it.
This made him go home and think
about the thing he wanted. Did really need it? Was it really
worth it? Half the time, just having to drive back to the store
was enough to deter him from buying it.
He even found himself making
a game of it challenging himself to see how much of the twenty
he could still have left at the end of the week. He started saving
the extra money to use for something bigger and more special
that he wanted. Often, after he had a nice chunk added up, he
decided to just apply it to a bill. Watching that bill slowly
go down told him he was winning the game.
If you have tried other ways
unsuccessfully, you might try the twenty dollar bill idea. --Oh,
and it doesn't have to be a twenty. Depending on your circumstances
and where you live, it could be more or less, but pick an amount
and stick to it. It may take a week or two to figure out how
much you want to allow yourself but, after that, use a set amount
and that amount only for your miscellaneous spending money.
With this system, if you spend
it all by Wednesday, too bad! You will have to eke by the rest
of the week and, if you aren't already bringing your lunch to
work or finding other ways to save, you will find yourself starting
to do it just so you can save more of your "twenty".
What I like even better about
this idea is, at the end of the week or month, instead of having
a huge column of little piddly things to add to your ledger,
you only have to make one entry for the twenty for each week.
I did find it interesting that
at the end of the show, after presenting all of these complex
suggestions, the woman was asked "What do you do if your
house payment is more than you can afford and you are deep in
debt?" She paused with a strange blank look on her face
and said, "There are only two things you really can do--
earn more or spend less."
That's it in a nut shell. We
can make charts and write lists but the bottom line is, we simply
need to either stop spending or start earning more.
Too often, we focus on learning
how to get out of debt with the misconception that, simply by
learning, we are doing something about our problem rather than
focusing on getting out of debt by actually stopping our spending.
Often, we want to know how to
save on the large amount of groceries we buy, never thinking
that we could save a lot simply by not buying so much. Or, here's
one that I love: "My husband lost his job, so how do I save
on our vacation?" I don't know how to say this gently but,
if you don't have a job or you had a pay cut and don't have enough
money, you don't take a vacation, play golf, buy new things to
fix the house, put your kids in sports, throw expensive birthday
parties, keep buying junk food or convince yourself that you
really need to keep your cable and Internet to help you find
a job.
There is one way and one way
only to get out of debt and that is to spend a lot less than
you make. The more desperate your situation, the more drastically
you have to reduce your spending. Some of you may have to go
from having your hair, nails and toes done once a month to only
having your hair done. If things are really tight, maybe you
can't pay to have anything done most of the time. You may have
to learn to share only one car. You might have to start walking
or taking the bus. Whatever you need to do to pa it off, get
serious and do it.
Key words for today's lesson.
Stop spending or start earning more. |
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