Should We Shop Our Way Out of the Financial Crisis
Filed Under (Credit Cards Blog) by creditblogger on 22-10-2008
I had a chance to watch the Colbert Report for the first time in months this week, and there was an interesting discussion about how folks should handle the financial crisis. Stephen mentioned something that I thought it was worth mentioning here. He asked the expert at hand whether we could “shop our way out of the crisis.”
Here is why this is so interesting. So many of us get over our troubles by shopping our way out of them. You have probably seen it with your friends or people who you know. We get into a trouble, and we decide that we either eat out way out of it or shop our way out it. We go shopping, or spend a lot of money in restaurants. I have done it before, and it is a very effective (if not optimal) solution.
But that’s not the solution to our problems nowadays. You can get things that you don’t want to give you a sense of comfort these tough days but what you really should be doing is save as much as you can. Times are tough, and who knows what’s going to happen next. Yahoo! just laid off 10% of its work force. Now those folks may find jobs easily but not everyone who loses their job can get there fast enough. If you have a family to provide a living for, then you know the importance of having money on hand in case of an emergency. Saving money takes time but spending it can happen in the blink of an eye.
So Stephen is wrong about this issue. You can not dig your self out of a hole by digging deeper. Do yourself a favor and save your money. That fancy gadget is not going anywhere.
