Leadership & Self-development: a cash only diet in our quest for financial fitness

I enjoy reading blog posts from Business Insider columnist Katleen Elkins. She writes about personal finance and money. In her quest for financial fitness, she recently decided a cash-only diet to test its effectiveness.

The Financial Fitness Program, introduced by bestselling authors, Chris Brady and Orrin Woodward, advocate the cash only-diet as a strategy to avoid impulse purchase and to get out of debt.

Research shows that people spend significantly less when using cash instead of cards (credit or debit).

The cash-only diet is as simple as it sounds: You ditch the plastic, determine how much money to withdraw for a certain amount of time, and buy things only with the cash you allocated for yourself.

I am glad to share with you some excerpts of Katleen’s testimony based on her two weeks experience using cash only and she is telling us why she is never going back to her debit- and credit-card days:

1. I know exactly how much money I’m spending.By withdrawing a certain amount of cash on a specific day, I knew exactly how many days it took to spend that amount of money. It’s eye-opening and alarming how quickly it disappears, and it forces you to change your spending habits.
2. I think longer and harder about big purchases and cut back on spending after making one.By allocating a fixed amount of cash for a fixed time frame, I realized how one big purchase could wipe me out for the week.
3. Having cash at all times is convenient.Sometimes cash is simply the easier form of payment, something I completely underestimated and never fully appreciated.

If you want to learn more about the Financial Fitness Program, I invite you to dig more and sign up for free on this website www.financialfitnessinfo.com. Your reference number is 61238105 to have access to free content and you may invest on educational materials and tools such as track and save and much more.

As Brady & Woodward indicate in the Financial Fitness Program textbook, “If you want your finances to change, you are going to change something about your finances.”

Ditch you cards, use cash, and educate yourself about “the money thing”. Be the kind of learner who takes immediate action when you learn a new principle.

God Bless,

Roosevelt