The first PSA I have is about money, specifically cash. We all think about money to a greater or lesser degree. Some think that money is a bad thing and misquote the Bible passage. The passage says, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). Money is not evil, but making it central to your life (loving money) is not a good thing.
I think we can all agree that we need money to keep the lights on and food on the table. The things that we can accomplish with money can be good or evil, but the money itself is totally amoral. But let me move on to cash.
We shopped at a certain large chain store during the time frame that they got hacked. We were totally unconcerned because we deal with CASH only for almost all of our purchases. The nice thing about cash is that it cannot be hacked. We didn’t get our identity compromised because we used cash to pay for
what we bought. In fact, we don’t worry about any place we shop or eat getting hacked because we always use cash for our purchases. Can we lose cash? Of course. And we have in the past. But we can’t get our account cleaned out or a balance run up because the cash we carry is all we use.
It does take some getting used to, but now that we are a cash-and-carry family, we are much less stressed about money. We don’t pay interest on any credit cards. We don’t carry a balance anywhere but our bank accounts. And the best part (oddly) is that if we don’t have the cash, we don’t buy. That forces us to live within our means. That allows us to save money and not have a bunch of junk cluttering up our house. We are still trying to dejunk from all the years we bought things with plastic, but we are no longer adding to the stockpiles of clutter.
So this first PSA of mine is simple: Use cash for all purchases. If you do not have the cash, you cannot afford the purchase. Want to get started but not sure how? Click here to check out the guy that helped us get started: Dave Ramsey.