A key principle to be aware of about dealing with debt is the idea of not creating anymore debt in the moment or during your day. This is hard for folks to grasp at first because we have ourselves believing there is an unlimited supply of money. We tend to think since we have consumer credit accounts readily available, we have money to spend.

I found that when I started saying no to spending like that, I got a lot of joy in conscious non-accumulation. Let me explain.

For many years when the opportunity arose to simply get the little things that my thoughts told me would make me happy, I bought them whether I had the money or not. I wasn’t listening when others told me to save for these purchases rather than spend, spend, spend.

I’d had to save money as a youngster for these purchases, but I was now and adult. Adults are allowed to spend money they don’t have … right? That was the perception. It wasn’t the reality.

There were a couple of old-timers that really got me to think about the concept of saving money for my purchases instead of getting the stuff using consumer credit. I started to watch and become aware of what I was doing, so one day I decided to give this a try.

As I remember, the first item I decided to save for instead of charging was a television set. Each week I’d hold back eleven dollars, placing the money in my sock drawer in the bedroom.

As the money got to about forty-four dollars I could feel different things going on inside of me. I hadn’t held back even that much money in over a decade.

By the time the money built to seventy-seven dollars I really was feeling good about holding back this amount of money. I discovered it wasn’t really that hard to do. At this point I was about half-way there. I realized I was going to buy this television and own it free and clear when I brought it home. Hadn’t done that in a long time.

As this was going on, thoughts of the interest payments we were making on so many things over the years and how this was actually working against us kept coming into my mind. When the day arrived to buy the television, we never did. It had taken over three months to hold back that money. I’d sacrificed a few little things to be able to have that money in my possession.

Somehow the new television didn’t seem worth turning loose the dollars in exchange for it. The new set wasn’t that much better than the one we already had.

That’s when another idea came to me. It appears that if we save for our purchases rather than using consumer credit, we’ll save between eighteen and one-hundred percent.

Had we charged the television for a year, we’d have paid eighteen percent interest on that purchase in we’d financed it for a year. That would’ve been an eighteen percent savings, by not paying the interest fee to the creditor.

We actually ended up saving one-hundred percent because the purchase we were saving for simply didn’t seem that great an exchange for the cash money anymore.

We each have the power to change our thinking about how consumer credit works against us. This concept means something and is important for you to realize. It’ll help you deal with your debt issue. Billions and billions have done this before you and you can too.