Watch for Money Leaks

How do you spend your money? Some people don’t even know where the money goes. Putting together a budget and accounting for all your spending may help you spot some leakage you weren’t even aware of.

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." Charles Dickens – David Copperfield.

How can you move from debt to wealth with continual outlays?

If you are financially stretched how will you afford it?

A daily spending review watch might help... Beware of Money Burners :

A major plank in applying the Law of Attraction is to recognise that there is an abundance. We should not have a scarcity mentality.

I am not contradicting that by saying that we shouldn't spend any money through fear of not having any. Nor that we should not spend it on ourselves on things that enhance our day.

BUT...you may be surprised how much money just gets “burned up” on things – activities or "stuff" – that actually adds little value or enhancement to your life. It leaves you with less wealth rather than more as you are left with nothing to show for it.

Worse, it might also waste your time and drain your energy too.

There is nothing wrong with a little light refreshment or a harmless pass-time - nothing in itself. But everything has what is called an “opportunity cost”, an alternative that could also have been purchased. From the perspective of your quality of life - is it enhancing it or diminishing it?

Where welfare is generous there are many who plead poverty and yet will find ways to spend money on lottery tickets, magazines, junk food... they cost money to buy but are little actual value.

To get something different you will have to do something different…. Some things will have to change and perhaps that means some of our little routines and habits.

Here is a quick list of potential money burners:

-  Drink (soft or alcoholic)
-  Cigarettes
-  Lottery tickets
-  Newspapers
-  Daily Coffee
-  Daily chocolate/crisps
-  Chatting on Pay as you go phone
-  Daily fruit rather than weekly
-  Other Junk food
-  Bus instead of cycle or walk
-  Car instead of cycle or walk

It is easy to see how money can be “burned” almost surreptitiously but you can see how much it all adds up to when it is blended into your day by performing a daily spending review.

Alcohol and cigarettes are obvious ones, anyone pleading poverty who still smokes has serious priority issues. I would say at this point that as a student I was a smoker. Money was tight, but amazingly however little money I had I always somehow had a cigarette to smoke when I wanted one - It is a matter of prioritising!

But do a daily review and see what you spend money on.

Have you even realised you spend 50c a day on a candy bar that boosts your sugar level for a moment before actually leaving you less energy. The same with that daily fix of pepsi or coffee that costs $2. A brisk walk in fresh air might have the same vitalising effect.

OK, so at lunch to take the healthy option and buy a banana to have with your homemade sandwiches that you brought with you to save some money. But you find that buying a single piece of fruit with your lunch actually costs you 5 times as much as would if you got a week’s supply in the supermarket and brought that with you too.(50c)

And to accompany your lunch to get a newspaper to mull over while you munch (50c). Afterwards it is good for lining the rabbit hutch so that is good value – notwithstanding the freebie advertising papers that would serve the same purpose.

That is already : $3 a day - $80 a month - $1,000 a year! that could have been spent on something else.

That is without using pedal and foot power to get to the local shops which are only 2 minutes drive away – without not buying the lotto ticket – which has been called “A tax on people who are not good at math!”

And then there are the mobile phone or energy tariffs where you are paying over the odds - simply because you have not got round to looking for and changing to a better deal!

Too often in the Western World the plea of poverty simply masks the lack of aspiration to do anything about the situation. If we are more careful about our choices and priorities we can set our minds to a higher vision and give up some of the things that simple give us short-term gratification and free the resources we require to invest in ourselves to better our lives.