Priorities and Sacrifice - Where do they lie?
Day 3 of the 33 Days and 33 Ways to Reduce Debt Challenge at No Credit Needed is about sacrifice. What are you willing to sacrifice to get out of debt? And what won’t you sacrifice?
For me this ties into priorities. What things are a priority for me even above debt reduction? Because those are the things I keep spending money on, right? And what things are not as high a priority any more?
Well, there are many things we gave up, like going out to eat, extras at the grocery store, trips to Target for random stuff for the house, new clothes, I cut back yard sale shopping even. My spouse wants a Playstation 3 and I want a Dyson. But we are not purchasing either of these things until we are out of debt and save the money for them. My spouse says by then it’ll be a Playstation 4 he wants. Heh.
We could save the money now for these things a little at a time, but we choose not to, funneling that money to debt reduction instead. But there are things I do continue to save for, even if it is at a scaled back degree while we are aggressively reducing debt. I save for each of my children’s college educations. I save a small amount each month for a new furnace for our house because it is 20 years old and we don’t want to have to finance a new one when it gives up. And my spouse makes a 401K contribution each paycheck. Any or all of these savings plans we have put into place could be diverted to save for one of our *wants*, but our priorities are with other things now. And these savings plans continue even in light of our debt reduction, because for us there are some things as important if not more important than reducing our debt. And those are ours.
There are also a few things we *could* eliminate (not necessities like food or shelter) but we choose not to. One is activities for the kids. My son will be doing gymnastics this fall and my daughter mommy-and-me swimming. I don’t want them to miss out on life experiences because of choices their parents made before they were even born. But I choose one activity at a time for each of them, I don’t do as many as I might if money was no object. Another is cable TV. My spouse says he’d rather stay in debt than give up cable. I’m not sure he’s kidding. Right now, our cable is basically free (we have a package introductory deal with phone and high speed internet, and separately those two would cost as much as the three combined) but it won’t stay that way, next April the cost will go up. We need the high speed internet, it is specifically required for my contracting work. But we’ll have to revisit cable television. As I watch a rerun of What Not To Wear and type this, I sincerely doubt we’ll cut the cable. But we’ll see. We’ll still get a three-service discount and it might end up being really cheap for the cable.
Sacrifice is all about priorities. What is more important than debt reduction, and what is less important.? The less important can wait, or be eliminated altogether.
~J
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June 29th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
When I called to cut my cable service, and I refused all their new bargain bundles, they were actually willing to extend the first year rate for another year to keep me as a customer. You might see if you can get the retention rep to do that for you.