It is 21st century now, most of the people understand the importance of controlling spending in achieving greater wealth. People are getting smarter as they can choose to absorb info from variety of medias rather than a few. Book on personal finance are everywhere and many of them are very well written. Books like the millionaires next door, rich dad poor dad don’t become the best selling books for no reason, there are people who are aware of virtues like frugality and delay gratification, and these people learnt this information from the book, the mindset of the millionaire. The prodigious accumulator of wealth, a term introduced in the millionaire next door is being adopted in many wealth building teaching.

Many of us know how to do it, but are we really walking the talk? I talked to some friends of mine about cutting down spending (as some of them are accumulating a lot of credit card debt and resorted to cut the credit card to half). People know the know-how, it is simpler to say something like; just cut down spending, don’t shop so much, commit an amount in settling debts, etc. People are aware the need to change their habits and lifestyle but how many have the drive or will to see it last? In order to further look into the problem of overspending habit, we need to understand the root of the spending behavior, we need to understand what cause us to spend impulsively.

Now if you have a paper and pen, list down 5 or more reasons you over-
spend. Think as long as you want.

1. ………..
2. ………..
3. ………..
4. ………..
5. ………..

So have you already written Down the 5 reasons? Are any of your reasons sound like these: I overspend when I’m stressed out, I feel good when buying branded clothes, I don’t seem to realize I spend so much, I do this only once in a while, the deal is just so great that i have to buy more because this could be the last time, life can only be improved not degraded! Give yourself a clap for being honest, there is nothing wrong in pursuing for material desire, in fact the ultimate objective of controlling spending, frugality, and live below mean is to pursue greater wealth thus also pursuing greater materialism, but only it is done later. This is called delay gratification.

So you have listed out the reason, what should we do about them? Take the examples from above. For the first one asks yourself, why do you feel better when spending, or do you feel bad if you don’t spend? If your answer is yes, then you need to find other ways to relief stress, such as a tiring ball game of squash, tennis or badminton. If your answer is no, then it is even more pointless to spend a lot for nothing. Probably you are just stressed and bore, the advice is the same. However, even knowing this will not solve the problem if you don’t have the emotional resiliency to take persistent action. In order to become more resilient emotionally, we need to think of the consequences of our actions. Good habits lead to better outcome, bad habits leads to worse result, in relativity comparison. A smoker will not have a healthier lung than a non-smoker by science logic. A daily jogger has a stronger heart than other non-jogger, common sense. Do you want to be a jogger or a smoker? Only when you fixated the objective in mind, a solid one, then you will be able to achieve emotional resiliency. If you want to have a stronger heart, jog regularly. If you want to be financially success, spend wisely.

We have been taught what is good and what are bad in the school, we follow that ever since (well, probably not all). Now why not do yourself a favor by telling yourself what is good or bad?

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