Suze (Orman) Says
The other night, I stumbled upon " Suze Orman's Money Class " on PBS, during their fundraiser. At first, I was only half listening, but a few things she said really caught my attention.
The simplest yet hardest advice Ms. Orman gave was to live not within your means, but below it. "If you can afford a 2000-square-foot home, buy a 1500-square-foot home. If you want a new car, but your old one is running fine…don't buy a new car."
It's so easy to slip into the "I can afford a better one" mentality. It's very much like when I was in my 20s and I thought all those grown-up things were so far away, I may as well spend what I have now. I didn't have very much money, but I went through twenties like tissues anyway. What is putting a mere hundred dollars in a savings account now going to do for me later? I'm sure I need the money more now. "Grown-up me" will make enough money later, so spend now.
But that's not how it works. Ms. Orman advises again and again how important it is to do something about your retirement right from the beginning of your financial adulthood. (I'm not sure I ever met anyone who did that.) Then another self-destructive thought creeps in … "Well, since I should have been doing this since my 20s and I haven't, I'm much too far behind to ever catch up, so I may as well worry about it later." Or worse, "I'll be making so much more later that it will make up for everything." But it won't, if you keep the spend-it-now mentality.
We filed our taxes and got a refund. It's excruciatingly tempting to act like it's found money and spend it all. We've been so "good" about not spending money, it's even harder not to "treat" ourselves. (Note that those deprivation mentality words fuel the spend-it-now behavior.)
But there is a smart way to spend, when you have to, too. If you keep your credit pristine, you're likely to get offers for zero percent credit from credit card companies and store credit cards. If so, include financing options in your decision with whom to spend your money.
To properly fix a leak, we ended up replacing our entire HVAC system. (Not an expenditure you want to ever be surprised by.) We got a few estimates and finally went with a company that would give us an interest-free year to pay. They cost more than some other companies' estimates, but they offered a zero-percent for 12 months financing option.
We opened up a credit account with them, and the payments we would be making anyway to pay the balance in full over a year, go instead into an interest-bearing savings account. When the twelve months are up, we will pay the full amount out of the accumulated savings. Granted, interest rates are not very good right now; we'll probably only make about 2 percent on the money over the course of a year, but that's 2 percent plus the money we save on what could have been an interest-bearing credit card charging interest for that whole year.
How To Get Zero Interest Credit Cards
Zero interest credit cards are probably the most under-utilized way to get on one’s financial feet. There’s plenty of advice available on using lower interest debt consolidation loans to consolidate credit debt and reduce monthly payments.
However, very rarely do we hear the suggestion that we can get away with paying no interest at all unless someone is trying to sell us furniture on a buy now and pay later basis. Yet, special zero rate charge card offers provide a fantastic way to significantly reduce monthly expenditure on credit cards as well as to get out of debt sooner.
You don’t have to be a materialistic, greedy individual to find yourself overspending on charge cards. So many things can go wrong in this high cost society that can increase our charge card debt. Serious illness, emergency repairs and job loss are just a few common situations that can cause our credit card balances to soar.
Most of us hope that things will get better and we will be able to catch up later, unfortunately the higher our credit card balances, the higher our monthly payments. This increasing monthly cost can keep us poor and make it difficult for us to ever get back on our feet. The largest part of our monthly charge card payments are interest charges.
Therefore, it only makes sense to reduce our interest costs as much as possible and you can’t get lower than zero interest. By simply transferring your charge card balances to one of the many available zero interest charge cards you will be able to save your interest charges for a given, introductory period of time.
There so many introductory charge cards available that it can be difficult to sort through them and choose the best one for your needs. It is important to choose an offer with low balance transfer fees and a long introductory period during which you do not have to pay any interest at all.
The easiest way to find zero interest credit cards is to use a professional online credit card service which has already done a lot of the hard work for you by finding the best deals. These sites not only give you a number of charge cards to choose from, they also offer online applications to make things convenient and easy.
However, to truly make the most of zero interest charge cards, you can keep transferring the balance to new zero rate offers before the end of each introductory period. If you do this, you will never pay interest. Unfortunately, with the best will in the world, life tends to take over and we can easily forget to transfer the balance before interest payments kick in.
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