“Smart families don’t pay interest—they earn it.”
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
I was sitting in a meeting last month when someone was giving a presentation on family finances and since I’m the kind of guy who has a hard time concentrating on numbers (they read more like Egyptian hieroglyphs to me) I started to zone out pretty quickly. In fact, if I recall, the presentation lasted about 15 minutes and I probably daydreamed right through it.
Then, towards the end, the presenter said a line that caught my interest: “smart families don’t pay interest—they earn it.” I’m not sure why it struck me, but it did. After all, my finances are in poor condition (remember, I’m the new guy here at Finicity) and I’m always worried about how much interest I’m paying on the various credit cards, department store cards, consumer credit accounts and so forth. However, I’m rarely worried enough to do anything about it because, again, numbers scare me.
But this saying: “smart families don’t pay interest—they earn it” challenged my self-perception. I thought to myself, “hey! I’m smart! I know lots of stuff about lots of things! I have multiple college degrees! How dare you say that I’m not smart because I pay interest!” Then, of course, the reasonable side of me kicked in and I evaluated the statement and came to a startling realization—I pay lots of interest and that is not one of the smarter things I’ve chosen to do in my life.
So, I started thinking about that statement: “smart families don’t pay interest—they earn it” and there started to be a paradigm shift in my head. Instead of ignoring my financial problem (which, let’s face it, I can do with skilled ease these days) I was going to have to attack it. More importantly, I couldn’t face the problem like I had in the past—with haphazard and inconsistent tracking of my expenses. I needed something that would allow me to set up a plan and stick to it. In other words, a real, live, honest-to-goodness, adult budget.
That thought scared me. I started to get bogged down in thoughts like how much time it was going to take and how boring it would be (remember: numbers are not my thing) but then I remembered the saying: “smart families don’t pay interest—they earn it” and I made a decision.
Rather than trying to take control of my finances in one fell swoop, I decided to start small, and for me, that means paying off one credit card. To start, I did a simple run down of my income and my necessary expenditures, looked at how much I had left and decided that I would allocate enough money each month to double my minimum payment on one credit card.
Having set that up, I felt better about my situation. Next month, I’ll get brave and see if I can up the amount I’m paying to the card in order to pay it off faster. In other words, I’m starting out small with my budget, and I’m feeling much more successful managing my finances. You might even go so far as to say I feel a little bit smarter today.
Andrew Parker, Marketing
