While having a victoria secret credit card may boost your credit if you’re able to charge and pay it off every month, you may want to look a little deeper and see if having a credit card from that store makes sense in the first place and you may be spending too much of your paycheck there. A budget is a great way to tie in your monthly expenses, plus food, gas, and spending money to ensure you have funds allocated in the right places, while still building an emergency fund and saving for retirement, avoiding any money wastes that you can.
Not Eating at Home
Certainly, we enjoyed our mother’s home cooking, and probably still do enjoy going back home to get a little comfort food, but on your own, especially if you’re not a good cook, is easy to pick up carryout or go to your favorite restaurant. This can take an immediate hit to your finances and could be spending hundreds of dollars a month going out to eat when a fraction of that could be spent by going grocery shopping and preparing your meals at home.
Keeping Your Gym Membership
We all want to lose weight, get into shape, and in January, it seems like a great time as ever to join a gym and live out your new year’s resolution of dropping a few pounds. At first you start to go regularly, and then once you miss a time or two, the visits start to become more infrequently and then pretty much you’re paying every month although you haven’t been in months. Do yourself a favor and cancel the gym membership, take the dog for a walk every day, throw in a few jogs, a well-balanced diet, and you’ll see the weight come off quickly, saving yourself some money in the meantime.
Not Cutting the Cord
Once your promo rate expires, the cable bill is jacked up and you’re paying a couple hundred dollars for hundreds of channels that you don’t watch, let alone any shows you do watch are on DVR so you don’t have to watch commercials. If you can cut the cable cord and opt for a streaming service instead, even getting an HD antenna for local channels, you probably won’t even notice cable is gone after a while, and saving plenty of money in return, while even doing a little more around the house instead of laying on the couch watching TV.
Paying Interest Every Month
Where a credit card can get you is if you have a spending problem and spend more than you can afford, so if you’re not able to pay the full statement balance by the due date, interest will kick in, and now you could be paying 15% interest until that balance is gone, which the more the balance ticks up, the higher the monthly payment will cut into your budget and other areas will suffer, especially savings, that will unfortunately be ignored in order to pay debt, seemingly never getting ahead.