PERSONAL MONEY MANAGEMENT

Why is it so hard to conquer the relatively easy subject of personal money management? I mean really, shouldn't handling your money from week to week, or month to month be fairly simple? Why can it seem so overwhelming and complicated?

As far as I can see handling money is the easy part. We can all do a pretty good job moving our money out of our checking accounts!  Properly handling money is the much harder part to master. To me there are only two main reasons that handling your day to day finances gets hard.
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1. Unplanned expenses
2. Too much free time

Most people carry credit card debt. The two reasons that people usually end up with carry credit card debt are unplanned expenses and overspending/too much free time. A simple emergency fund is one way to be prepared for unplanned expenses, but what about having too much free time/overspending?

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We are social creatures as humans. We like to be surrounded by people and do fun things together as a group. I can't blame anyone for wanting to do that!

The bigger problem is that when you have too much free time to go to the mall or out to dinner, your credit card usually takes on some extra charges that wouldn't normally be there. Once your balance on that credit card begins to creep up so that it can't be paid off every month then we start stressing out about money.

​As we continue our normal spending habits, the pattern of overspending continues on to a new credit card, then a third and fourth card. Pretty soon we are overwhelmed with debt and we can't figure out why personal money management seems so darn hard!

Next time, we will discuss some amazing tips and tricks to get out of the mess, along with some best practices to stay out of credit card debt once you get there.