When I was a young child, my uncle would amaze me will different kinds of magic tricks. One of the tricks he would do and the one I enjoyed the most was the old "quarter behind the ear" trick. Looking back on it, the trick was pretty cheesy and if I'd paid attention, I could have seen exactly how the "trick" was being performed.
It's been about 20 years or so since I've seen a magic trick involving money. Yesterday, I saw something that could have been described as a bad money trick.
This guy in front of me at the gas station purchased $90 in gas and $10 in lottery tickets and paid with a hundred dollar bill. In a matter of seconds, the hundred dollar bill was gone. I can't believe how quickly this guy went from having a hundred dollar bill to not having it.
If I want to giving my savings a boost, maybe I should switch to using cash only. I know it would be alot harder to spend cold hard cash versus putting the purchase on my debit card.
Great post - recently my bank detected a suspect charge using my debit card. They called me to verify it wasn't mine and canceled my card. For 7 days I was on cold hard cash - and it was an eye opener. It is way harder and much more painful to see my $20's fly out of my hands than it is to slide that debit card. I would use cash way more often except it is incredibly difficult to track where I'm spending - it's so handy to just download debit purchases into Money and sort them out. But, cash is definitely harder to spend.
Bethesda, I would just ask for a receipt for every cash purchase you make. It is almost never a problem since one normally prints anyway.
That is a fast (and crappy) way to drop 100 bucks, and it leads me to wonder why anyone would spend the extra 10 dollars on lottery tickets at the gas station! Aren't they getting enough money right now? There is no insurance that you are going to win anything, anyway, so why not hold on to the 10? People are something else, I tell you.
Jerry
www.leads4insurance.com