The one thing I have had the hardest time with is the waiting that is involved with any kind of financial transaction. Things like waiting for pay day, waiting for something to sell, waiting for my savings to grow, waiting for the bill payments to show up on the account, waiting for the bills to be paid so I can see what’s left, waiting to see what the bills even are… and the list goes on. Sometimes I feel like one minute can feel like hours when I’m waiting to see the results of my efforts
Here’s the wait I’m grappling with at this particular moment in time… the wait to save for something I really want instead of putting it on a credit card.
My computer completely broke a few months ago despite efforts to fix it and buy replacement parts. It wasn’t even that old, it was under 4 years old – I suppose that’s a dinosaur according to some. So anyway, it’s no longer and we have been using a borrowed computer for a few months now. Borrowing a computer is the alternative I chose instead of going into debt.
It would be so very easy for us to use any one of our credit cards and buy a new computer. But I refuse to add new debt. Debt is no longer an option in our household.
What if you can’t pay it back later?
The most crucial part of being able to get out of debt, or save, or even learn to live within your means is to make sure that no new debt is accumulated. Not one cent. The “I’ll pay it back later” mentality is what got a lot of people (including myself) in financial trouble in the first place.
I started my financial changes because the recession made me realize that I wasn’t prepared for a job loss – it never dawned on me before that there might not be a “later” available to me. If I had a drastic change in my financial situation, my priority would be to provide the basics for my family – food, our home, and what we need to get by. The last thing I would want to do, or be able to do, is pay the bills for some useless junk. I’ll chat more about this “revelation” some other time – the recession really did save me.
Today, I don’t own a computer. I keep thinking about how I would feel if I bought the computer on a credit card and then lost my job shortly after. I often try to imagine what a jobless me would think about every purchase I previously made - how would I feel about a month’s worth of Starbucks purchases on credit if I lost my job and was looking at the bill afterward? I’d feel pretty sick about my decisions.
We are saving some money here and there for a computer. It has taken a long time because we are focusing now on things that are more of a priority – things that should have been more of a priority all along.
