6 money truths l wish someone told me sooner

I’m going to share six different truths about money that I wish somebody taught me at a younger age some of these I had to figure out on my others somebody might have taught me at some point where I learn from some books over time but I want to these with you and found that they ended up saving me more money-making me more money and just helping me financially all around so if you want to improve your personal finance if you want to improve your wealth and increase wealth over your lifetime.

let’s start with the first one which is sort of adopting sort of a minimalist type of lifestyle this is something that I’ve been moving into it the past about six months or so really just cutting back on a lot of the clutter that you have in your house and things that you think that you need that you don’t need to be happy in life I found that for myself as I just moved everything out of my apartment just last week and I’m moving into my new couple of days here and so in that process when you’re cleaning out your apartment or if you’ve ever rented somewhere and you’re filling up truckloads of stuff that you just didn’t think you had and I found myself in this position so really I’m gonna be focusing on cutting back on a lot of just materialistic things that you just don’t need for example having a toaster oven and microwave and a conventional oven and just having all these different like things that you just don’t need and end up costing you more money because when something breaks you have to pay to fix it and then you go to the store you just end up buying so much more stuff and you know if you’re orfering one thing per week on amazon that’s fifty two things per year and then they start to add up over the years and that’s 500 things over a decade that are just sitting in your house sitting in your apartment that you just don’t really need so that’s the first one that i want to share with you .

The next one that I want to share with you is an idea that I learned quite a while ago but it’s still something that scares me that a lot of people don’t realize and that’s just avoiding debt and almost all costs now if you’re fans of saying dave Ramsey or Chris hogan or some other people you’ll know that debt in a lot of cases something that you want to avoid but if you look at the average amount of debt in America it’s still very scary to see that people have credit card debt student loans home mortgages car payments personal loans the list goes on so Americans have tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt and one thing that I just want to you remember after reading this blog post is just before you sign on the dotted line to just think twice about it because I think especially this goes for people who are buying cars it just seems like such small payments and maybe say sign for a car and you’re paying 300$ a month for that car loan or four hundred dollars per month on that loan and it’s just something that you don’t really think about as much because you say you know it might be four percent interest and so a lot of people just sign on the dotted line it and this goes for people if you’re considering gouing to collage and i think it’s a little bit kind of strange to see seventeen year olds literally signing for a hundred tousand dollars in student loans .

it`s just kind of a weird situation but just be very aware of how much money you’re actually signing to borrow because you’re gonna have to pay that back and you’re gonna be hit with a lot of interest rates especially if you don’t have a good credit score so just just really think twice about it now there’s a couple things that are hard to avoid when it comes to debt so for example if you want to buy a house in your 20s or 30s you’re probably not gonna have a quarter million dollars on hand in cash to pay for that house so a lot of people get home mortgages which can be understandable but when it comes to cars for myself i like to buy them in cash and yeah some people argue that well with that money that you could have saved by maybe not putting a lump sum of fifteen thousand dollars down on a car and sending investing that in the stock market getting seven percent so that you could pay four percent on the car loan but to me it it’s just I don’t like having debt in my life it’s just like this over looming dark cloud over top of you and say you’re looking at your bank account one day and you have fortythree thousand dollars in your bank account but you have sixty eight thousand dollars of debt just looming overhead and it’s it’s just kind of this this feeling that’s that’s not a very good feeling that that I would get personally and I’ve had debt in the past but I’ve paid almost all of it off because I just really really am NOT a big proponent of it and it’s it’s also just not very necessary in a lot of cases now I’m gonna kind of flip you around here because this next idea might be a little bit confusing but I think you should stick with it because it’s going to make a lot of sense once you can me out here and that’s by realizing that credit cards can actually be used as tools to actually become more successful in life financially as well so credit cards as a general statement are going to be something that you should probably avoid that the overall population overall people consumers should probably avoid credit cards and that’s because a lot of people are going to get credit cards they’re gonna spend money that they don’t have they’re going to spend more money than what they thought they were going to spend or they just forget to pay their bill they’re late on their payments and end up spending a lot more money on credit card interest now the reason why the credit cards can be used as a tool is because you can use these for rewards you can use these for signup bonuses so for example if you’ve been following me on Instagram you’ll probably notice that I’ve been doing quite a bit of traveling or a least compared to what I used to do I never left the u.s. until just this year in 2019 but since then I’ve been on about 20some flights and a good amount of those flights were actually funded by free credit card bonuses that I’ve gotten to essentially fly me places for signing up for credit cards now I’ve never paid a single penny in credit card interest there’s.