There are dozens of reasons why we get into debt. For some, it’s unemployment or underemployment. For others it’s a divorce or a medical crisis.
For many of us, our spending is the cause of the problem. Each trip to the store is dangerous. Each online shopping spree is a ticket to more debt. Our homes, our cars, our vacations are all examples of a life lived outside of our means.
Lauren Greutman knows just how detrimental this can be to your finances. Eight years ago, Greutman came face-to-face with a crushing reality. Her spending had landed her family in $40,000 of debt. She confessed to her husband, and with his support, they began to turn their situation around. She’s now debt-free and sharing her story in her new book The Recovering Spender: How to Live a Happy Fulfilled Debt-Free Life.
Greutman recognized her spending for what it was: An addiction from which she must recover if she wanted to find happiness. While she has made positive changes to her spending behavior, she knows that like those addicted to alcohol or other substances, she is not cured. She is in recovery. She knows one mistake could cost her.
It is this raw honesty that keeps you engaged as she guides you through her personal experience and proven 12-step recovery plan to help you turn your financial life around. From determining whether your spending is a problem, to getting at the root causes of your financial troubles, Greutman keeps her tone helpful, conversational and real.
Greutman recognizes that the idea of keeping a budget sounds like prison to a spender and offers specially-tailored advice to spenders on how to start and stick to a budget.
She has one of the best analogies to describe the need for a budget.
She writes:
A budget for a Spender is similar to a fenced-in backyard for my kids. It is meant for safety, not for the strangulation of creativity and fun. It is meant to give us freedom, up to a point. Think of your newly created budget as a fence around your money. The fence gives you the boundaries as to how you can spend your money. It doesn’t say you can’t have fun or can’t spend, which is how you think it will feel. The budget fence says, “Here is how you can spend your money. Learn how to have fun within this fence.”
In her 12-step plan, Greutman outlines exactly how to pay down debt and “stay within the fence” in a way that is easy to understand. The Recovering Spender offers actionable steps you can take to change your financial picture and gives resources to help.
If your spending has become a problem, The Recovering Spender offers the help you need. This book is also a great resource for savers who live with spenders. Understanding spending addiction, the motivation to spend, and learning how to break the spending cycle from someone who has done it, are all critical steps to finding financial success and living the life you want.
While Hachette Book Group did provide me with a review copy of this book, the opinions expressed here are 100 percent my own and were not edited by the publisher, author(s), or their affiliates. This post also contains affiliate links which help support this blog at no additional cost to you. Please read my full disclosure policy for more information.
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