13 Trash Financial Habits You Need To Stop ASAP
So you have good manners in society, but how's your financial decorum?
These behaviors aren't doing your finances any favors, and they're probably holding you back. Even if they're harmless in the immediate term, they're not a good look, and may cause your friends and colleagues to judge you. It could even end up costing you future opportunities, since you won't look trustworthy with finances.
Read on for the behaviors that are making you look bad to those around you, and worse than that, wrecking your finances.
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1. Haggling With Cashiers or Food Service Workers
While vendors at a flea market or antique fair might expect a little price negotiation, the cashier at McDonald’s decidedly does not. For anyone working at a fixed-price merchant, customers who haggle are nothing more than a headache wasting everyone's time trying to save a couple of dollars at best. You only live once, so don't burn hours of your existence and your reputation around town to save a small amount of money.
2. Trying To Live Above Your Means To Impress Others
Cover the basics before you spend on discretionary purchases that you think will make you look good in the eyes of others. In fact, we'll go on further and say that you should only spend your disposable income on things that make you happy and not bend to social pressure. Not only is this financially dumb, it will never make you happy. All you'll ever see when you look at luxury items is the money you spent on them without the joy they could have brought. If you depend on others for your tastes, you'll never find happiness. If you're not hurting anyone, buy whatever you enjoy and nothing more.
3. Not Being Financially Transparent With Your Partner
Relationships are built on trust and there are some issues that couples must be aligned — chief among them, money. Not being honest with your partner about money habits that can impact both of you, like secret spending or debts, can be considered “financial infidelity” that violates trust and causes distress.
4. Maxing Out Your Credit Cards
As a trauma-informed finance professional at the Money Mindset Hub, Alejandra Rojas thinks a lot about mentalities around money. She said that maxing out credit cards without making timely payments can be stigmatized as “low class” in the culture at large.
5. Pursuing Short-Term Satisfaction Over Long-Term Goals
The tale of the ant and grasshopper has lasted the test of time because of its powerful message about the importance of saving for lean times instead of recklessly pursuing pleasure. Though it’s tempting to think of people who overindulge on everything that catches their eye as the frivolous grasshopper, Rojas said that there can be a thought process behind this spending.
She said that people who prioritize immediate satisfaction over long-term planning might believe that they’ll never have a chance at making this purchase again, so they have to do it now.
6. Not Wanting To Gain Financial Literacy
Learning about finance is one of the fastest ways to build better money habits, lift yourself out of debt or achieve other major goals. However, you have to be willing to start. Many people who have been considered low class or low income can feel defeated before they begin.
While there's plenty to learn and a lot not worth bothering with until your wealth makes it a concern, you should always be curious what the options are for your income and standards of living.
7. All-Around Poor Financial Management
If your credit is low and your bank account is overdrawn, you’re getting calls from collection agencies and you still don’t have enough for the bills that are about to become past due, you might be showing overall poor financial management — it's a bad look for anyone whose fiscal life is entangled with yours.
8. Buying Lottery Tickets Regularly
While taking your chances at the Mega Millions is understandable and daydreaming about what you’d do with your fortune is super fun, some people look to the lotto as their only way to get out of debt or rebuild their finances. It's not going to happen for you, so limit your lotto spending to a few bucks a year and chalk up the loss to cheap fun for dreaming about what could be.
9. Taking Out Loans To Pay for Vacations
Taking out a loan is a major financial decision with long-term implications for your future. Accordingly, it’s generally reserved for major purchases, like homes or cars, along with lifelong investments like higher education. The thought of racking up loans to hit the beaches in Maui seems like incomprehensibly poor planning — yet several Redditors have observed people doing just that.
10. Treating Bankruptcy as a 'Get-Out-of-Debt Free Card'
Many people are one accident or job loss away from circumstances that might cause them to need to file bankruptcy. Choosing to file for bankruptcy is a serious decision and organizations like Debt.org encourage you to consider paths like credit counseling or pre-bankruptcy counseling before putting your name on the dotted line.
11. Getting Cars That Don’t Suit Your Lifestyle
Unless you’re an off-roader in your off-hours, odds are you don’t need the largest, most expensive SUV. If you don’t count racing as a hobby, you also probably don’t need a car that Mario Andretti in his heyday would have loved.
When Redditors in the main Ask Reddit forum posed a simple question about the biggest signs that someone was bad with money, several automotive professionals jumped into the conversation.
“I work on cars for a living and the vast majority of the BMWs that come into my shop have slick tires and lights blinking on their dash,” wrote one Redditor. “So many of these people can barely afford a luxury car, let alone the maintenance required to keep them nice and running.”
12. Wasting Food
Letting perfectly good leftovers go to waste isn’t just poor etiquette, it’s also a sign of poor financial management — especially when the cost of groceries remains high and turning to DoorDash is so unnecessary.
13. Neglecting Crucial Home Repairs
Whether you’re hoping to sell your home again or simply don’t want to live in a space that doesn’t work properly — water draining through the living room doesn’t exactly add ambiance — you need to prioritize home repairs.
One Redditor recounted the story of their friend’s father who left a sink broken for years:
“My childhood friend had a broken sink for about 10 years. It had a hole in it so the water would flow into the ceramics. Meanwhile his dad kept finding new expensive hobbies that he never did anything with. He bought an entire forge at one point for thousands or euros and never really did anything with it.”
This article was provided by MoneyLion.com for informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial, legal, or tax advice.
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