29/07/2019 Making Smart Financial Decisions | REAL MADE MEN

REAL MADE MEN

An archive of the writings of Assanova

Making Smart Financial Decisions

Originally posted on: Jan 19th, 2012.

Over the past year or so, I had been digging myself out of a financial hole. I was thousands of dollars
in debt, and really had no clue of how I was going to get where I wanted to be. I’m now at a point
where my credit is finally cleaned up, and I no longer have to worry about owing money. I know that
many of you are in the boat that I was in, so I’m going to share with you some of the decisions I made
to get myself to a point of being financially sound.

The very first thing that I did was make a drastic lifestyle adjustment. I cut out everything that was
non-essential. I literally went from being the number one party boy, to being the party pooper. This
has cost me friends, and it has cost me social value with women, but in the end, it was something that
I deemed to be absolutely necessary.

The next thing that I did, was I started spending my checks two or three pay periods ahead of time,
deciding exactly which debts I was going to pay down. I still bought myself something nice every few
months, but almost all of my checks went directly to paying off my debt. After bills and paying down
my debt, I literally left myself with nothing but money for food. As soon as the money hit my bank
account, I paid my bills and paid down my debt before I could go out and make impulse purchases.

Going back to the subject of friends, I intentionally kept myself away from a lot of them. Why?
Because as long as I wasn’t around them, and going out all of the time, I didn’t feel the need to spend
money just to keep-up. When you’re around friends who spend all kinds of money, buying luxury
items, and living an extravagant lifestyle, you find yourself spending all of your money just to fit in. I
think this is what absolutely cripples most men when it comes to finances.

And lastly, I started thinking about my purchases. I decided not to buy any “maybe” items, and this
included the small things that I would see when out grocery shopping. As far as the bigger purchases
went, I waited months before making a decision. I sat, I researched them, I thought about it, and I
weighed the pros and cons. All of that may sound trivial, but it made a huge difference in my life
when it came to my finances.

—-
Also, monitor your credit, people. You can’t ignore your financial problems forever. Refusing to
acknowledge the problem isn’t going to make it disappear.

This entry was posted on November 2, 2013 by Stoic in Money.

h ps://wp.me/p2QaqK-b0
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