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The American Journal of Psychology defines: “A habit, from the standpoint of psychology, is a more or less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience.” Sounds pretty beautiful and rhetorical, but how can we break up with habits that apparently interfere with our daily routine and negatively impact the possibilities of getting success?
The theme of bad habits is closely linked to your financial behavior, as things such as overspending or insufficient financial control may entirely ruin the stability that every sober-minded person tries to maintain. Of course, none of us is infallible and can make mistakes during our whole life. Nevertheless, the situation is changing when we start to make identical mistakes regularly without even trying to identify the source of a problem.
In this article, we comprise seven means on how to develop healthy financial habits and structure them into our commercial lifestyle.
1. Level Up Your Financial Literacy
Financial education is not what you can get at once or purchase from the local stores, it is a pretty continual aspiration that makes your worldview broader and broader during a long period. Try to educate yourself by reading about financial literacy on investing, follow business tycoons (such as Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc.), and try to privatize their experience. Grab all possible means to use the entire scope of the information exchange, as there are too many things that you are not aware of yet.
2. Don't Overspend With Your Credit Card
Non-cash transactions, like card payments, are pretty usual things in our reality; however, sometimes they can create pretty unpleasant results if you hold bad habits, such as overspending. In contrast to cash or so-called debit cards, credit cards do offer a continuing balance of debt that borrowers will be charged against.
Actually, one of the best solutions that can prevent you from the phenomenon of overspending can be hidden in this general piece of advice. Try not to trade for something that takes longer than three to four months to repay it back. Also, do not concentrate the target only on monthly repayments set by lenders, try to pay off your debt as soon as your budget allows. You just need to clearly understand that the long-term burden always takes a long time and requires more expenses, as you need to repay not only the principal amount but also interest, service fees, and other applicable charges.
3. Set Automatic Transfers
Most Americans do hold at least two kinds of bank accounts: checking/current and savings. Usually, the current account is aimed to serve your regular needs such as making daily purchases. Meanwhile, the savings account is for storing your funds and even getting an interest against it. If you hold a bad habit of not topping up your savings account on a weekly or a monthly basis, you can easily set automated transfers from the current account to the savings account. Just contact your bank and request to set regular transfers in accordance with your provided schedule. Start from two or three percent of your monthly after-tax income, and try to grow this habit into an addiction.
4. Become a Wiser Shopper
Impulsive shopping is a kind of strategy constructed by marketers that aimed to provoke customers to shop for items or services that they do not obligatorily need. For instance, one of the best examples of impulse shopping can be shown when the retailers display items, such as chocolate bars or a great variety of gum, near the checkout point in supermarkets. This is a well-designed structure to lure new buyers and make more money on it.
If you want to avoid such kinds of unnecessary expenses, first of all, you need to plan your trip and write down the exact list of items that you are going to buy. And secondly, keep you only the necessary amount of cash that is sufficient to complete your purchase.
5. Ask For Lower Prices
Always try to get better prices than you have been offered. It does not matter you are doing your daily shopping or trading for something valuable. Actually, you cannot get discounts every time, but you can save lots of money on simple things. This mechanism needs to be used in online shopping as well: try to not buy items with a fixed value, look for auctions, and take them out at a reasonable price.
6. Get rid of Predatory Loans
There are too many people who think that short-term loans are absolutely bad happenings only because of higher APRs. Actually, it is not a matter of dispute that most of the quick cash lenders charge higher than in usual leading practice. However, we need to understand that emergency advances such as payday loans online are not everyday products, and we need to take them out as soon as we plan to return the debt within a brief period. Besides, it is also very important to deal with licensed and sophisticated lenders in order not to be victimized by financial scammers.
7. Replace Your Bad Habits With Healthier Ones
Literate financial management is not about checking your bank account and identifying a daily or monthly balance between your income and expenses. You need to clearly point out which behavior motivates you and which creates a mirage of motivation. For example, if you know that you are going to spend money on things that you do not necessarily need, just do not take your wallet with you. Sounds pretty simple, but everything starts from similar kinds of elementary things, as Benjamin Franklin says: "Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship."
