Published: July 3, 2011 • Last updated: January 7, 2021 at 2:21 am

Once your money is spent, you can’t get it back – use it wisely.

When my son was 16, he worked at a pizza store. He would tell me how many people will order 4 or 6 cans of pop with their pizza order – adding several dollars to their bill. He said, “Dad I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just go the grocery store and buy a 12 pack or even a 24 pack on sale for the same money.”

Or how about all the people who cry poor but routinely withdraw cash from an ATM machine other than their own bank? That $20 might get hit with charges from your bank and the machine owner you tapped into. You could easily give away $3 or $4 from every $20 you worked so hard to earn. Does that make sense to you?

I love espressos and café lattes – but at $4 or more per drink at Starbucks or Second Cup, that can surely add up over the month. Two drinks per day, and you have wasted close to $3,000 over a year.

When you sat down in January to figure out your finances, did you give yourself permission to spend $3,000 on fancy coffees? Do you think there might have been a better way to spend that money? (And of course, to make that $3,000 after taxes and deductions, maybe you actually had to earn as much as $5,000 pre tax !!)

Growing up in a large family of six kids, we each had our school uniform (with two shirts to alternate) and one set of play clothes. As we became teenagers, if we wanted more stuff, we were expected to find jobs, and then we could indulge ourselves with more clothing or whatever else we thought we ‘needed’.

Now yes, that would seem extreme to almost everyone today, but the fact is, it was a non issue. My parents chose to spend their discretionary dollars elsewhere. Each year they took us on a family vacation and we accumulated so many warm childhood memories.

Keep Track of Your Expenses

There are families out there that legitimately have fallen on hard times (I’ll share their stories in the related articles section) who don’t have the luxury of having discretionary income to waste. The truth is most people don’t have money to burn, so really take a hard look at your finances – save your receipts and go over them once a month and find out where your money is really going. In fact – No form found and get started today!

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