Becoming Fiscally Conservative

I've alluded to previously owning massive amounts of unsecured consumer debt and basically charging a car; really, it's like charging it when you have payments. Except that the interest doesn't keep going up.

Lately I meet people who are very open with their financial traumas, and they're people we can learn from, if we already haven't learned those lessons. They're all over the economic spectrum. One woman is very open about her bad credit and must not really understand the mortgage industry. She has a home equity loan but says the bank should never have given it to her; clearly there's no understanding that she got the loan because it's secured by the house. It's unlikely the house has retained its value in the past couple of years, but she has a good, solid job so she should be able to continue to make payments.

Nevertheless, she gets in trouble with other bills, like cellphones. For some reason, she pays for three of them, one for an adult child, one for a minor child. Her payments are over $200/mo for the phones. She must have a lot more time and/or services than I do. Because of late payments, changes in her carriers policy and changes in her contract, she was forced to pay a bunch of money up front to get the accounts re-opened. They used to let her carry a late balance, as did her tv source, which is another item she pays late, which results in many added fees. One of the tricks for saving money is to keep better track of dates bills need to be paid and not incur a late fee.

Another thing a couple of people have gotten int trouble with is online gaming. I don't know what the gaming sources are, but it really doesn't matter. One person has a recurring Paypal payment; I haven't had any trouble with Paypal, but I've heard some horror stories, such as hundreds of dollars in bank charges because if you have it linked directly to your bank account, Paypal goes in every day to try to get payment, if you don't have funds the first time. In some cases, they make multiple tries a day. $35 a crack adds up pretty quickly.

In another situation, someone puts money into the gaming account at a pay-each-play webpage. She put in $10 or $20 at a time and only upon receipt of her bank statement did she realize that she had spent $400 on gaming in one month. Easy to do because all you do is click. She went back in to close out her account and because she hadn't been playing, the company had given her $50 in free credits, which she is playing and then will cash out. Hopefully she has the strength of will to close the account. She's pretty solid economically, but if she keeps up the $400 monthly allotment of games, that's going to change quickly. I download free games and have found enough games to keep me entertained for the amount of time I spend doing that sort of thing.

If it's financially questionable, have someone talk you off the ledge. The economy is too shaky to take a lot of chances.