The Stock market is down, the stock market is up; Congress is about to approve the bailout bill, Congress did not approve the bailout bill, Congress is in recess for two days; the Credit market only has one day of float, three days, a week . . .  the bailout is good, the bailout is bad.
Confused by conflicting reports?  You should be. Like they say, if you are not confused you are not paying attention.

In the meanwhile people on Main Street and on Wall Street realize that the balances on their credit cards are getting unmanageable, and some are wondering if they should even use credit cards at all.
As usual each individual situation is different, but if you have decided to do something to cut down on the amount of personal debt, step # 1 is to stop adding new debt.  And while it’s easy to say that you’ll pay off the new charges at the end of the month, some people don’t have the discipline to curtail their spending in order to be able to pay off their monthly charges.

We have some suggestions for tactics that you can use to manage your spending:

• Use a credit card the same way you use a checkbook: put as a starting balance the amount of money that you can afford to spend, and each time you charge something you write it on as if  you’ve written a check and deduct the amount from the total.
• If math is not your forte, round up the numbers of what you’ve charged to the whole dollar amount, so if you charged something for $26.06 write in $27.
• If you need to, you can write in as starting balance a (lower) weekly balance, and deduct (spend) from there, adding a new amount (deposit) every week.  Make sure to NEVER go into negative balance, you are trying to bring discipline into your spending.
• On a weekly basis you can send a payment to your credit card company, either via mail, pay by phone, or internet banking.  Credit card companies don’t mind if they receive 4 or 5 payments in a month.  And if you are carrying a balance on your credit card, this method not only will decrease the amount of interest that you’ll be charged, but it will practically eliminate the risk of you being late in your credit card payment.

It might seem like a lot of work, but it’s not.  It’s an investment of time to learn money management skills, well worth the time, it will pay dividends for a lifetime.

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Photo Credits: neurmadic aesthetic (cc)