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Author's advice on how to
fight the temptation to splurge on gifts, when you're already overextended?
1. Remember the greatest pleasure we derive as human beings is not from material
things, but from family and close friends. The most important gift you have to
share is your time. Bake some cookies and spend good quality time with your
family and friends, rather than spending excessively.
2. If you are strapped for cash, set a strict budget and follow it. Make your
budgeting exercise a lesson, and a real gift to your children and family.
3. If you can’t pay for gifts with cash, don’t buy any. You will have to pay the
money back. By putting the pain upfront and possibly avoiding it immediately
(since you don’t have the cash to buy presents), you also put off the day of
debt reckoning later.
4. Use cash instead of credit cards. It makes the experience of blowing your
hard-earned cash more graphic and more real.
5. Pay no attention to hype intended to create a sense of urgency for you to buy
(big price markdowns, free shipping, etc.). If you can do without something, you
can do without it. At the end of the day, money out the door is also money out
the door no matter how inexpensive something is advertised to be.
6. Try window-shopping where you go out and look at all the things that you
normally would buy on credit. Take the list back home with you and add it up.
Then imagine you were at the first week in January back at work with that debt.
Then imagine yourself without that debt.
7. Take the same debt from #6 and determine how long it would take to pay it
off. Using the credit card interest rate figure out how much interest you would
be paying on that debt. Then figure out how long it would take you to pay off
the principal, the interest, and both with your after-tax hard-earned dollars.
“7 Golden Rules for Spending Less:” living within your means, not spending on
things you don’t really need, using discretion in spending, doing your own work,
always seeking to negotiate better prices, and “pinching dollars so that pennies
pinch themselves.”
right.)
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