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Why am I in debt? Why are you in Debt?

Have you ever asked yourself this question? Have you heard other people often talking about being in debt and that they have too much debt? While you may be asking yourself the very question that millions of others are asking their selves, I want to tell you about why most of us are in debt. It is all about spending too much on stuff that we do not need. 

One way to have more money is to quit spending too much money. As a society in general, we all have to learn to spend less, to have less, and to enjoy life more in a manner that is not as costly. We do not have to have everything that the neighbors have in order to have a great summer vacation. We do not have to have everything that the neighbors do in order to have a great holiday.

What we do need to do is sit back, think about what is most important in our lives personally, and take it from there. 

Ok, enough about that. In this article, I want to tell you about overspending. How we all over spend so we can stop and think about where we can cut back, save money and have a stable financial future.

There are many reasons why we over spend. Over spending how ever leads to debt. Too much debt leaves us with less money in our pockets every month. 

The first major reason that many of us go into debt and too much debt is for our image, to keep up with our friends, family and our neighbors. They have something and we want it too even if we do not need it! 

Over spending begins by buying something just because someone else has it. On the other hand, it could be as simple as going somewhere because someone else is, even if we cannot afford it. That is keeping an image, and images are difficult to keep up with if you have a family and if you are on a limited budget or income. 

Along with keeping up with the neighbors, and keeping up an image, we often are over spending when we are shopping or eating out with others. To keep up when we are out with our friends shopping we tend to buy more than what we need, and we purchase things that are more expensive just to show that we can. 

When we are also out shopping with friends, relatives and co-workers, we also tend to pick up the tab when eating out, when traveling in a cab, or when we are ordering something in the office – why? Because we want to show off but this leads to spending to much and increasing our debt. 

We often tend to spend money more often when we have more on the way. It is almost pay day, or it is almost tax day, and we know we have money coming so we spend more money. Spending money seems easier when we know money is coming soon. 

Another reason that many of us have too much debt is because when we are using a credit card it doesn’t really seem like we are spending money. Using a credit card is easy. You can go out, buy stuff all day long and still have the same amount of cash in your pocket, until that credit card bill comes along and we realize that we spent way too much money for those jeans, those shoes, or for that hair cut. 

Shopping is something that makes us all feel better about ourselves because we were able to go out, get what we wanted and come home. Shopping with a credit card, we are often left thinking to ourselves, it will only take three months to pay off but ultimately it takes much longer because the next month we don’t want to spend too much paying on that credit card bill as well. 

Being married, having a good job, having no children, or having no debt leads us to lead a life style that is higher priced or higher charged than some other people. In living this life style and then adding children, adding more bills, adding the loss of a job or the loss of hours on a paycheck, our bills are unbalanced to what we are accustomed. It is difficult if not impossible to keep up the life style when changes are added to the budget or equation of money in the household.

Simply put, having too much debt is a result of each of us thinking that we have to spend money to live up to what others are doing in their lives. Money is a sign of power in life, and spending money somehow makes us think that we have some type of power over life. Ultimately, learning to say no to our inner selves is going to leave us with less debt and more money in our pockets.