Fortune Watch

Does your spouse or partner complain that you’re spending too much money? When your credit card bill arrives, are you surprised to you find that you charged more during the month than you thought? Does your closet contain lots of shoes or clothes that you almost never wear? Do you own every gadget known to man (or woman)? Do you come home from the mall with items you had no intention of buying? Do you spend money on things that you didn’t realize you needed until you saw them on display in the store?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you probably suffer from impulse spending. When people are unable to save money for the things that are really important to them, like a house, a new car, a vacation, or retirement, impulse spending is often the culprit. If you don’t have specific financial goals, it’s more difficult to resist spending money on items that don’t really have any meaning to you.

Once you’re already saving regularly towards your most important financial goals, you may want to have a fund to use specifically for occasionally spending money on unplanned items. Then you can indulge in occasional impulse spending without jeopardizing your financial future.

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I was involved in a discussion some time back and we were discussing this and all of us thought it was ridiculous that they don’t teach a personal finance class in high school, at least not when we were in school. Is it any wonder that when kids go off to college they rack up so much debt? According to some statistics I read that the average undergraduate has credit card debt!

The logic behind teaching children and teenagers about personal finance is pretty obvious. Just think of all of the finance clichés that you’ve heard: start investing as early as you can, the most important factor in investing is time, don’t get into credit card debt, etc. – all things that are best to learn sooner rather than later.

And because many basic aspects of personal finance currently aren’t taught in school and are left to be learned at home, this current system seems to nurture the fact that wealthy people tend to stay wealthy and poor people tend to stay poor. I don’t think it takes a giant leap of faith to see the possible correlation.

A simple personal finance class with discussions on retirement, the negative impact debt can have on a person, automobile financing, and saving for the future instead of buying for the now should be implemented in every single high school across the country.

The best long term solution is educating people so that they want to save by making financial capability a compulsory part of the school curriculum and embarking on a public awareness campaign to show the potential hazards of not saving.

Did I really need to learn Chemistry if I had no interest in any fields that would need it? I would think that learning how to control one’s money would be of more help to most people. Thoughts? Did you have finance classes in high school? If you did, did they help? I would love to hear about your experiences!

The time to pay up for last years holiday has come around again, but you may have came back from holiday only to find that there a few items on your credit statement that you don’t remember paying for.

Here are some tips on the direction you should take if this occurs. My friend Jag from MyPeculiarThoughts has also compiled Tips to transform yourself into a Savvy Card user is worth reading.

The first thing you should do is to contact your credit card company. If someone has illegally cloned your credit card details, you could find more of the same type of credit card transactions on your next bill.

The next thing you should consider is contacting all the providers of the other credit cards that you took with you on holiday. You should let them know that you think that one or more of your cards has been jeopardized and that you will need to have your accounts checked for abnormal transactions. The simplest way is to let them know when you returned back home from holiday and that any purchases from abroad should be thought of as suspicious.

Tell the credit company to cancel any cards that are thought to have had any suspect transactions performed, and instruct them to send you out new replacement cards. It will usually take a couple of days to receive your new plastic, so in that time you will have to use other arrangements to pay using cheques, cash etc.

The credit card company that you use will investigate any suspicious transactions in part to make sure that you didn’t make any of the purchases and just forgot about it, and they might be capable of plotting out a pattern of transactions from somebody that is travelling from region to region while using your card.

You should ask that your credit company send you out an amended account of your transactions and that they don’t ask you to pay on you disputed credit card bills.

One last thing, you might receive some calls from someone who claims to be from your credit card company, and they want to check your newly issued credit cards for security reasons. If they ask for any secure information, don’t let them have it, it could be the criminals calling you, and they know that you have probably been issued with new cards. They do this in an attempt to obtain entry to your new accounts.

Remember; just make sure that you can account for everything on your next bill.

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Credit Card Users & Financial Planning

With interest rates still on the rise, now is the time to take a good look at your finances. You may find that there are some things that you need to change.

If you have debt that is affected by interest rate, you need to look at where it is going to take you. This is a good time to make an effort to start eliminating your debt.

Interest rates are raised to stimulate savings and slow down borrowing. That is exactly what you should be doing.

You may find that a substantial portion of your money is going towards credit card debt. With interest rates on the rise, you will be paying more to your credit cards.

Start with a little financial planning. Make a list of all of your credit cards and other unsecured debt. List each account including the payoff amount, monthly payment amount and interest rate charged.

There are two ways to start paying off your debt. If you need a boost to get you started, start paying off the smallest debts first. This gets you on a roll. It feels really great to mark off each account as it is paid off.

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