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Are you working for your stuff or is it working for you? As the stuff in our houses collect so does our consumer debt. Spending on credit cards is commonplace in our society. Once used for emergencies, now used to live above your means. Credit cards, in general, are a losing proposition for the consumer. A winner for the banks. A credit card bill is just another bill that adds to your working life. The less bills you have, the less you have to work. In making over your finances, the first thing to go should be the credit card bills. We often purchase items on impulse and otherwise would not have purchased if we were using cash or an ATM/debit card. Most items purchased on credit cards are items that depreciate. And by the time you factor in the cost of charging items, the cycle of digging a deeper and deeper debt hole has already been set in motion. What do we do with all of the stuff we buy? It sits in our homes taking up space until we need a larger house to store our stuff. Then when we get to a larger house, it doesn�t look like we have that much stuff and we buy more stuff. You stay in one place too long and your stuff quickly adds up to junk. Things that you no longer want emerge, and you realize what items you didn�t really need. How many times have you thought to yourself, �Wow! I wish I had all the money I spent on this or that. If I didn�t have all of this stuff, I would be rich.� When DVD�s first came out I can�t tell you how many DVD�s I purchased at $20 a pop. I had so many I had to shell out extra money to buy DVD racks just to hold them all. The money I should have had in the bank was sitting on my newly acquired racks to hold the stuff I had purchased on my credit cards. My credit cards that I carried a balance on and paying the minimum payment each month was barely covering my finance charges. The more stuff we have, the more things we have to have in which to store our stuff. Shelves, bins, boxes, a larger house, maybe even a storage shed. It is estimated that less than 10% of the population actually lives within their means. For this, we thank the credit card companies and ourselves for being sucked up into the debt game. The debt game that none of wants to belong to. That none of us wants to work for. And what for? To pay for storage costs for our stuff. Taking a look at The Life Cycle gives us the clues of what we should be striving for today to not be slaves to the stuff we hang on to. How do you make your stuff work for you? The money is spent, so for things you don�t use, no longer fit, no longer work, etc. cut your losses of storage costs and recoup what you can. Money in the bank is much better than a broken camcorder in the closet that you have no intention of ever having fixed. An easy start to making your stuff work for you is to post your items on E-Bay. I have tested this and it works. Cleaning out my closet on E-Bay earned me over $1000 in 4 weeks. Stuff I don�t even miss. Be in charge of your stuff. You decide who is boss. For related articles see� Cleaning out my closet on E-Bay earned me over $1000 in 4 weeks I made over $100 selling my old CD�s and DVD�s to a new website. The Life Cycle The Debt Game: Don�t Play it. |