Guilt-Free Shopping

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

Hi Everyone! Sorry for the posting delay…tax season makes it a bit crazy for me!

A special hello to all of the new visitors coming from the Blog Party at 5minutesformom!

So what is guilt-free shopping? It’s when you buy something and you know you can afford it because there is money in the bank to pay for it!  In our house, we stick to a debit/cash payment style 95% of the time.  The only time we use a credit card is when making an online purchase for something like airfare, where we don’t find it to be a good idea to put our debit card number out on the web, even if it does have a Visa logo on it. 

But what happens when you are not in guilt-free shopping mode?  What if there are credit card bills piling up?  Where do you start to undo them?

The lousy part of this economy is that it brings out the vultures in our society–those who prey on people suffering.  Those who say they can “fix” your credit if you just pay them $500 or $1000  and they will get everything fixed for you.  Or they tell you you can “just declare bankruptcy” and that will work.  And then when it doesn’t work out you feel double-ripped off and helpless.

If you or someone you know is having problems managing their debt, there is a legit non-profit out there to help.   Try www.debtadvice.org.  This is the website for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, a branch of Consumer Credit Counseling Services (www.cccsinc.org).  With these folks, you have the opportunity to work with a trained, certified NFCC counselor.  And you can achieve for free or very little cost what these debt settlement companies may charge thousands of dollars for. 

I actually called these folks and interviewed one of their staff members for my book and asked every question I could think of to determine their legitimacy and understand how they work to make sure I wasn’t recommending a group that would rip off my readers.  These are good folks that can get you on the right track when you are ready to take control of your debt.  Then it is 100% guilt-free shopping!

Copyright 2008-2009 Kristin Delfau, author of Turbo-Mom's Guide to Saving Money Without Wasting Time a womens' personal finance book, and Aji Publishing.

Tags: credit cards, debt, free stuff, guilt-free shopping, saving money
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