Still waiting for hubby’s pay day! Hopefully, it’s tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Please, not next Monday!

If hubby’s payday is next Monday, he can forget about saving money on the industrial products he wants. The deep discount sale will be over by then.

Can he wait for another sale? Or even better, he doesn’t need them anymore. Wuahaha!

When it comes to spending, I always want hubby to cut down on his expenses. What to do? His spending amount is always larger than mine.

With hubby’s cooperation in controlling family budget, it’s easy for me to track the expenses using the personal budgeting software.

It was difficult to track hubby’s spending last time because he didn’t like to keep receipts or recall what he had bought. Sometimes, he simply didn’t want me to know what he had purchased.

Of course, I am not the kind of person who tracks every cent and dollar. I can’t bear with cracking my head thinking where I have spent the $1.50 or $0.95.

Some of my blogging pals who have had enough of frugal living are spending again. Oh, dear, this is dangerous, right?

They must have felt strangled or deprived by the frugal living that they quit whatever grocery, clothing, and concerta coupon clipping that has been saving them lots of money.

Spending again means that there will be new debt added into their existing debt amount.

It’s my hope that they get to stop their impulse spending before it’s too late. They will surely feel guilty after the shopping season is over.

Splashing the cash isn’t the only way celebrities get to grips with money. All that spending can sometimes lead to severe debt, which for many of us is a lot closer to home than the $10m diamond necklaces and diamond-encrusted mobile phones we read about in the papers.

Mike Tyson for example reportedly blew hundreds of millions of dollars on tigers, over 100 different cars and extravagant jewellery. But at his lowest point he owed creditors $27 million.

And Kim Basinger declared herself bankrupt in 1993 after a jury ruled she owed producers $8.1 million for backing out of a role.

Even our own Sarah Ferguson isn’t immune. The Duchess of York showed that blue blood just isn’t enough to keep in the black – in 2002 she reportedly had over $6 million in debt to repay.

I like using credit cards for several reasons:

• Most of the top-of-the-line cards will send year-end summaries of your spending, which is good for those clients who do not keep up to date financial statements.

• Credit cards are good for travel and other expenses and pay only one bill every month.

• It is good to have credit card debt available for those times when cash is hard to find.

The major drawback to using credit cards is that too many people overextend and find themselves in the black hole of high interest credit card debt. Credit card debt is easy to get into and sometimes very difficult to dig yourself out of. Read more »

Christmas is a time of giving and sharing, not of outrageous spending. It is very easy to get caught up in the holiday season, but you really need to be realistic about your spending habits this time of year.

Christmas spending doesn’t have to mean an increase in your debt load. Don’t fall for those buy it now and pay for it later options as you could find you still owe money for Christmas gifts in the spring the following year.

With some planning and saving, you can avoid using your credit cards at all for holiday shopping. This is important because you won’t have to pay for interest on the items you have purchased. You also will have those credit cards available in the event that any type of emergency situation comes up in the future. Read more »

Those who fail to use a family budget often end up with family problems and worse yet, devastating financial losses, all of which could have been prevented with a bit of planning.

Like diets, many of us have started on family budget only to see it wither away with time. Budgeting requires a commitment to ongoing tracking, analysis and implementation of frugal alternatives.

For some, the idea of a budget is often a blur. So budgeting is a chore people put off indefinitely. It is frustrating to see how hard it is to do a budget and realizing that with one wrong purchase, you can actually ruin the entire thing. And this has been a perennial headache for most homemakers. Read more »