Analyze This

We have been discussing the various was to eliminate your credit card debt, but now that you have an idea on how your are going to do it, you need to free up some money so that you can redirect it to where you would use the little bit of of extra money that you free up to immediately begin paying down your debt. One of the most effective ways is to write down everything that you spend money on, regardless if it is with some change in the cup holder of your car or with a swipe of your debit card. Do this for one month. It will absolutely amaze you when it is all added up. There are several tools out there for you to use. Since I now use only my debit card (and I do most of my transactions online), I used tools available at mint.com. Another one is The Latte Factor that is courtesy of David Bach of the Finish Rich series of books. The premise is that there is usually something small that you engage in each day, but think that it doesn't cost very much, so you really don't have to worry about it. He uses the example of a $5.00 latte (I usually drink a cup of the free coffee at work, so I had a bit of a tough time relating to that, so I used a $1.49 cup of Diet Coke © for myself). David Bach has a great calculator (free).

Just take a moment to see how much you are wasting/could be using for credit card debt elimination. In the example I had used, I had a $1.49 Diet Coke © and multiplied it times seven (because I work seven days a week) to have a figure of $10.43 per week. I used a period of 20 years and plugged that into the calculator. According the the calculations, my Diet Coke © habit costs me (over a period of 20 years) a whopping $34,170.04, practically half of my current credit card debt. And that is just one little thing. The premise is this: you probably have one or more things that you mindlessly spend your money on that can be used to build real wealth...it doesn't have to be difficult. You might think about taking a month to write down all of your expenditures and see where your wealth is being wasted.

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