You know how you feel when you turn onto a dark alley, late at night. When you are walking down the street towards your car. Everything is silent, too quiet, and you have the feeling that someone is watching you? Then, you speed up and make sure to have your car keys in hand before you get there so you can leave right away. Your heart is pounding as you basically jog on the sidewalks, looking in windows to see if you are being followed. Aaaahhh, the comfort of your car, you lock the doors, look in your mirrors and you can now breathe normally.

Most of the time, there is nobody following us. However, we always have the feeling that someone is near. This is when we get a bit more nervous but more cautious as well. It is too bad that this “spider sense” doesn’t exist when we are about to make a purchase with our credit card! And sometimes, the situation gets very bad and we need start looking for payday loans to compensate the minimum payment on our credit cards…

As I mentioned before, we are about to move next weekend. As we have always been quite reasonable with our furniture expenses ever since my wife and I have lived together, we have decided to treat ourselves right. We are changing our kitchen table, our dishwasher, we bought a small tv for the living room and we wanted to have a new couch for our home theatre. This is actually the end result while the initial plan was only to replace our 30 year old kitchen table….

This is also when I wished I had a spider sense that warned me before I pulled out the credit card out of my pocket. The result? I have an $8K balance this month to pay on it….

The problem is that I’ve felt unjustifiably rich because I sold my house and made a good profit. However, I threw all this money out the window by buying a second car (this was a necessity for commuting to work), reimbursing my parents in full (this was a loan from my parents to purchase the house I just sold) and buying nice furniture. While I will definitely feel more comfortable on my new couch, my line of credit is as well as a new mortgage at the same time… baaaddd move!

The temptation has overcome my will

I guess that the problem is that I have been fighting the temptation to buy stuff for the past 5 years. We had 2 kids, got married, bought our first house, etc. This was definitely not the right time to load my line of credit nor my credit cards. However, now that we have overcome most of our expenses, that I am making a much bigger salary, the temptation to spend money comes back around. You want to reward yourself for all the hard work, you want to treat your wife and family the way they deserve it and you want to enjoy life simply because (you think) you can afford it. This is where I am right now.

However, I know that while these are all good reasons, they are also all good reasons to dig yourself into a hole of debt within a year!

Fighting the temptation!

Now that I realize (a bit late) that I am overspending, I will come back to my best trick to pay off my debts: work darn hard! In the upcoming months, I’ll concentrate on working very hard on my company and at work so I can get a bigger bonus and more cash flow.

This extra money will serve only one purpose: I will use my regular pay check to pay for my normal expenses and use all the extra money to put against my debt.

I will also make a commitment to pay my credit card in full each month so I don’t have to pay ridiculous interest rates on them.

And… I will enjoy what I bought instead of looking at what I could buy over the summer!

this post was sponsored by Online Cash Advance

Mike

Mike

Mike, aka The Dividend Guy, authors The Dividend Guy Blog since 2010 and manages portfolios at Dividend Stocks Rock. He is a passionate investor.