Rebecca Walser, certified financial planner and wealth strategist, offers tips on how to avoid money mistakes, develop healthy spending habits, and pay off debts. 

<div class="block">Rebecca Walser, certified financial planner and wealth strategist, offers tips on how to avoid money mistakes, develop healthy spending habits, and pay off debts. </div>
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Wake Up With Cheddar

Stretching Your Dollar: How to Avoid Money Mistakes 

Welcome back to wake up with I do. And now you stretching your dollar money, mistakes happen all the time and spending more than you earn can lead to a lot of credit card debt here to give us advice on how to avoid some of these unhealthy spending habits. A certified financial planner and wealth strategist, Rebecca Walzer, Rebecca. Welcome. Thanks for having me. So when we say healthy spending habits first, tell me what that means. Well, I think you need to know what you're spending. Like we need to have a plan. We just can't have the credit card card bla unless we're super health independently and we can just do whatever we want. We actually actually need to know our lifestyle level and we need to budget around that. And so that means having guidelines and that really means a budget and that's what we need to know before we're going on to the world. And impulse spending is definitely something we need to do. We need to allow for that. So plan for it, plan, make your impulses actually planned. Why do you think it's so hard to maintain these healthy spending habits? Because you know, we're living a life, we go through emotions and, um, finance is actually, is one of the most emotional things about life because other than your family, your faith, you know, your finances are what determined, what you get to do with your life. So it is so emotional and people don't understand, they have to disassociate while they're planning, become less emotional, understand what you want and then make the plan so that you can allow yourself to live life. It's life, speaking of emotions and just living life. Do you think there's pressure these days to maybe overspend? Of course, you know, we had keeping up with the Joneses at mine to next grade. But uh for the yeah, millennials and Gen Z Fomo, fear of missing out what you know, you got all your social media, your friends are in Cartagena, smoking cigars and you're like, um what am I missing? What, what's happening? Why am I not there? And you start visualizing something else? That's great. Let's all have dreams and goals, but let's make them realistic. How do you avoid spending more than you make a lot of people fall into that? And they, and there's so much pressure, there's so like their social media, so much peer pressure, you, you have to find ways to be strategic with your spending where it looks like you're really enjoying on your lifestyle and it looks like a certain level could just be going to central park and putting out on a blanket, have a glass of wine and some cheese. It looks like you're, you know, a connoisseur of, of, of a life. Right? But it's 20 bucks. I have to say. That sounds lovely. It sounds great to meet you. You know, over consumption and overspending like we talk about can lead to a lot of credit card debt. How do people get back on track and of course, repay their debt? Yeah. Well, it's all about the plan people, there's, there's such a lack of planning. There's no financial education literacy taught in high school. There's not even uh even how to actually budget for planning for retirement. How do you start in your twenties? Thirties, forties. So I think the biggest dereliction of all of education in the United States of America is there's no financial preparation or planning and if we could just get that into our school system at a very young age, people would understand how to build assets, how to build wealth, how to save money, how to minimize taxes, we can get all this done, but we just don't have it in our schools when it comes to repayments. Is it better to make smaller payments or repay large amounts all at once? It's always better to make a list of an inventory of the debt that you hold, start with the highest and most compounding debt first. So if it's something that's compounding daily versus monthly or yearly. That makes a difference, believe it or not, it's called compound interest. So start with an itemization of the debt that we carry, start with the highest first and come up with a plan that will attack it as fast as possible. Do not be on the student loan until I die plan. You mentioned having a plan is so important, but for people that just don't know how to get started, what advice would you? There's so many apps right now, Hannah, you can download an app. You can track all of your receipts through an app just to just get a graph, a bar graph of where your expenses are going start with that start. But just knowing what you spend, most people don't even know what they're spending. Uh Yeah, I think a lot of people don't know what they're spending. Thank you so much to certified financial planner. Rebecca Walzer. Really great advice. Rebecca. Thank you.