I had an email from a lady who is $40,000 in debt and she has been struggling to meet her bills (sound familiar?) She ahs been trying to reduce her monthly outgoings but she is concerned that she is not going to be able to keep up the life style that she is in at the moment if she reduces a lot of her monthly outgoings.
I wrote to her and said that unfortunately giving in to the temptations to carry on in the life style that got her into $40,000 worth of debt would only end up with her being even deeper in debt. She emailed me back with a breakdown of her monthly costs and her lifestyle etc.
The first thing I noticed was that she was spending an absolute fortune on food each week. Now this is a single woman who lives on her own in a one bed apartment. I asked her to send me a copy of her grocery bill for last week and she obliged, she was spending $45 a week on fresh prawns for her cats!!!
After a number of exchanged emails where I became the worlds number one cat hater we eventually agreed that she would try and give the cats frozen prawns as they were 1/5th of the cost of the fresh prawns. In this case when the lady told me her cats would only eat fresh prawns, I replied with “A hungry cat will eat what ever you put in front of it!”
Sacrifice to get out of debt is important and making them is a family thing, that includes stubborn pets that insist that they are only eating the expensive food!
