40-Day Challenge Day 13

Rethink fast food or restaurants between now and Christmas. It may be eating up your available cash. Put the money you would have spent on fast food and eating out into your holiday food stash for gifts, baking supplies, and entertaining.

Listen …

I hear muttering, and I think I know the problem: Many of you don’t actually use cash to pay for Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Wendy’s, etc. You use an app, you order on the fly, the charge pulls straight from your bank account or goes on a credit card. So if you accept today’s challenge, how will you do that? Thanks to technology and the banking industry meddling in our day-to-day lives, it’s not easy because you’ve woven yourself into a tangled web that was supposed to have simplified your life.

If you insist on the no-cash, plastic-is-so-convenient method but you are fully committed to this 40-Day challenge, determine as well that you are going to do what it takes to make this work!

Drive thru the ATM first and get the cash you intend to spend on that meal, coffee, what-have-you. Yes it’s a pain, yes you don’t want to do it that way. But you can be sure it is going to wake up your mind to how easily you fly thru your paycheck or other sources of income.

Once you have the cash in hand, don’t cheat. Figure out what that frappe, meal, or snack would have cost. Now put that amount of cash in your Christmas stash. Feel the inconvenience and let it snap you out of the expensive rut you may have fallen into. The one that insists you are so much better off using an app, debit card, credit card to pay for everything.