Personal Finances

Where Does Your Money Go?

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This unit wouldn't be complete without showing you how individuals manage their money. Read this page to learn how to provide advice to someone with too much debt or high monthly bills.

Do you wonder where your money goes? Do you have trouble controlling your spending? Have you run up the balances on your credit cards or gotten behind in your payments and hurt your credit rating? Do you worry about how you'll pay off your student loans? Would you like to buy a new car or even a home someday and you're not sure where the money will come from? If you do have extra money, do you know how to invest it? Do you know how to find the right job for you, land an offer, and evaluate the company's benefits? If these questions seem familiar to you, you could benefit from help in managing your personal finances. This chapter will provide that help.

Where Does Your Money Go?

Let's say that you're single and twenty-eight. You have a good education and a good job - you're pulling down $60K working with a local accounting firm. You have $6,000 in a retirement savings account, and you carry three credit cards. You plan to buy a house (maybe a condo) in two or three years, and you want to take your dream trip to the world's hottest surfing spots within five years (or, at the most, ten). Your only big worry is the fact that you're $70,000 in debt, mostly from student loans, your car loan, and credit card debt. In fact, even though you've been gainfully employed for a total of six years now, you haven't been able to make a dent in that $70,000. You can afford the necessities of life and then some, but you've occasionally wondered if you're ever going to have enough income to put something toward that debt.

Now let's suppose that while browsing through a magazine in the doctor's office, you run across a short personal-finances self-help quiz. There are two sets of three statements each, and you're asked to check off each statement with which you agree:

Part 1
If I didn't have a credit card in my pocket, I'd probably buy a lot less stuff.
My credit card balance usually goes up at the holidays.
If I really want something that I can't afford, I put it on my credit card or sign up for a payment plan.

Part 2
I can barely afford my apartment.
Whenever something goes wrong (car repairs, doctors' bills), I have to use my credit card.
I almost never spend money on stuff I don't need, but I always seem to owe a balance on my credit card bill.

At the bottom of the page, you're asked whether you agreed with any of the statements in Part 1 and any of the statements in Part 2. It turns out that you answered yes in both cases and are thereby informed that you're probably jeopardizing your entire financial future.

Unfortunately, personal-finances experts tend to support the author of the quiz: if you agreed with any statement in Part 1, you have a problem with splurging; if you agreed with any statement in Part 2, your monthly bills are too high for your income.

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