Now, I know that I am pretty good at getting into debt if I don’t think about it. Not serious debt, but mild quantities of the stuff. In the first of this two-part series, here’s how to get into debt, for the record.
The first way to get into debt is slowly and piecemeal. If you are going out, don’t bother to pack a lunch. Stop by the corner store instead and pick something up. It’s only a few dollars. You need something for the house? Get it while you are out, right away, in case the need goes away. While you’re at it, get a few other things that you see that you might need as well.
The second order of business is to fall for your buying desires. Everyone has a few of these. Usually these are areas in which you feel like you can justify spending. For me, it’s home learning materials, food, and gifts. We eat food, so how can I not buy it? And come on, those materials would be just perfect for teaching spelling, or reading, or doing patterns in math.
You can exacerbate this tendency by visiting the stores where you get a good deal on the aforementioned items. If you put me into a store where I could get gifts or school materials for less, I’d be all over it. A hundred dollars later, I would walk out with things that were suddenly indispensable. A couple of months later, I would try to get rid of them for cluttering the house.
Oh, and my personal great-way-to-achieve-debt method? Have a crisis. In our house, this is usually the cat crisis or the medical equipment crisis or best of all, the household equipment crisis. If you have a crisis and you don’t have backup financially, that’s a fabulous way to get into debt. You can justify the expenses, and you don’t have the means to support them.
Stay tuned tomorrow for a less tongue-in-cheek look at how to address these issues.