With personal finance, as with so many areas of life, we have a tendency to swing between extremes. Often, an excess of spending – with accompanying credit card debt, clutter and stress – prompts us to take a good hard look at our finances. We make all sorts of good resolutions: a plan to reduce our debt, a savings account for our emergency fund, and so on … and somewhere along the way, we pick up the idea that we should only spend money on absolute essentials.
We might start off sensibly, cutting down on unnecessary spending to put some money aside for the future. But before long, we end up obsessing about every penny, denying ourselves even tiny treats like a weekly coffee or a magazine, because it’s a “waste of money”.
Are You Enslaved by Your Money?
Usually, being “enslaved” by our financial situation means we’re in debt, struggling to stay afloat. But I feel that there’s another sort of enslavement which we can fall into: forgetting that money is just a tool for us to use in whatever way we want.
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