Your Money as JENGA

Is your financial life like a game of JENGA? Remember the game JENGA, where you had a tower of blocks and had to remove some from the bottom and middle without the whole thing crashing. I have been thinking that could be related to our financial lives.

If you think of your income as the tower and your expenses as the blocks you need to remove. If you remove too many blocks or the wrong ones, the whold tower can come crashing down.

If you do have the game, one idea is to write different expenses on some of the blocks (mortgage, rent, groceries, dining out, clothes, etc) and show your kids what happens when you remove too many of the blocks.

The monthly expenses individually may not seem like a big deal, but if you get too many of those expenses they can add up and cause problems. So it is important to consider what the purchase will really cost you over time, not only the monthly cost. And if you charge the item to your credit card and are not able to pay it off at the end of the month it will end up costing you more in the long run.

Some people think they are doing okay since they are able to pay the minimum amounts due on their credit cards, but in many cases that barely covers the interest amount and it will take you years to pay off the principal amount.