You’re working hard to pay off all those credit cards and paying extra every month on all your other loans, including your mortgage, but you never seem to make a dent in it all, right?
Maybe the problem isn’t your debt, it’s your spending. Without having a spending plan that you track, you will never see what you really value emotionally and what really matters to you and you will continue to spend money for things that in the long-run, perhaps don’t mean all that much. But that’s where the problem lies, with the way you spend. Therefore, getting out of debt is first accomplished by getting spending under control and this can only be done by…
- Creating a history of how you spent money over the past year.
- Creating a spending plan with categories that balances both income and expenditures based on the way you spent last year and what you want to do differently going forward.
- Tracking that plan to see where you really spend money.
It’s nice to create a plan, but without tracking it, you will not really understand where money is slipping through your fingers each month. In addition, you will not realize how much you value something until you see how many times a month you spend money on it. If after looking at these patterns you see money being wasted in areas you really don’t want to spend, you can make changes. Over time, you will stop spending money in areas that do not matter to you and will not feel guilty about spending in areas that do. Once spending is under control, you will automatically find extra money you did not know you were wasting and this can be applied to debt. Most people find around $300 a month they are wasting.
For more information about how to make spending and debt elimination work together, visit www.moneymastery.com.
