Super Tips to increase your debt

Yep! you read the title correctly. So you want to live your life King Size, in a royal fashion with the meager amount of salary that you earn (peanuts huh..). Here are some of mind-blowing tips to spend you money faster than you can blink your eyes:

• Never read money saving posts or weblogs which may contaminate your mind towards efficiently managing your personal finance. These are evil!!
• Spend more than you earn. This is not the “common sense” approach, but who needs any sense, common or uncommon. And if you are struggling to meet your ends every month, then you are just about learning this art. Keep it up.
• Never pay your bills on time. Would a royal king in older times, bother himself engaging in such mundane tasks, like paying those insignificant telephone or electricity bills on time? It is for those mere mortals, who would setup email reminders or use those large desk/wall calendars with sufficient space to write notes and remind themselves of paying up these irritating bills, month after month, on time, thereby saving those tiny-miny amount on late fees. Such money-saving tips are a kill-joy for living life royally.
• Never worry about emergency fund. What is the use of the money lying idle when it should be running around with you in shopping malls. Some crack-pot websites urge people to keep six months of expenses as emergency funds Why should you worry about keeping such a huge amount, since you will never get hit with any emergency. Those nasty accidents, job-loss (Job loss insurance, OMG) or sudden illness happens only to others and not to you. So why bother about emergency funds?

• Never pay-off your credit card debt. You should keep a poster of John Biggins of the Flatbush National Bank of Brooklyn, New York and make him your GOD, since he invented credit cards. This is the greatest invention of man ever (forget fire, wheel etc). I bet that humans would still love credit cards even if it would have been invented during the stone age. Why credit cards are so addictive: 

• You do not need to think, how much your bank balance is, just think how much credit card balance exists on credit card. It makes it so easy to remember, even if you never done any math subject in your life.
• Also credit card companies are know to be generous enough to increase your credit card limit over the period of time sometimes without intimation. But isn’t it a pleasant surprise to suddenly find, during an impulse buying that your credit card just worked when you thought the limit has been crossed.
• You can have as many credit cards as you want with so many flavors and banks. Just look at in India and you have so many choices of type of cards.
• RBI has so many regulatory rules for credit card issuing banks that you are very safe. It has been seen on so many occasions that credit card companies flout these rules and also charge exorbitantly, but these are just small blemishes spread by the enemies of credit card industry.   Here is an example on how credit card companies make money.
• Buy on credit card and pay a meager amount monthly. This is called revolving credit and it is a revolution. Some people try to scare you with revolving credit maths, like this, but you can safely ignore such realities.

  Let us take a simple example. If you are spending Rs 30,000 every month and repaying half of it, you end up spending Rs 3.6 lakhs in 12 months. You pay back Rs 1.8 lakhs and owe the bank Rs 1.8 lakhs. But what the bank wants back is 40,000 rupees more than what you've spent...and keep this going for another year…this will become a runaway figure...On the same amount of Rs 30,000 spend, if you take it really easy and pay back only the minimum due, that is Rs 1500 a month, you will owe the bank Rs 2.3 lakhs. The bank will demand back, Rs 3.5 lakhs back from you and that’s Rs 1.2 lakhs more than what you've spent. Keep compounding this and you can fairly figure out where this could go.

• Credit card can get you cash from ATM if needed, what if they charge so much extra on cash withdrawals, think of the flexibility.
• Credit cards also offer rewards to customers (see here and here), although very few people diligently and consistently try to re-deem those reward points. But isn’t it so nice of credit card companies to offer rewards, which we do not redeem even when it can lead to significant saving, but that is just a small niggle. It is a supreme gesture from credit card companies.

• Impulse buying is the name of the game. We are talking about folks who are obviously above “roti-kapada-makan”, the basic necessities of life. So what good your money would be if you can not spend it when you feel like buying something. It is separate matter whether the thing you buy has any real value in your life but why worry about it? If you got it, flaunt it and if you haven’t got it, credit card will help you flaunting it. 

• Planning your money is insane. Why waste time and energy into something which is inherently unmanageable. If big companies like Satyam or Dubai World can not manage it, how would you? As you must have heard that “Money is the root of all evil”, they why keep the evil with you or try to manage the evil, get rid of it as fast as you can and you will be happy. So turn deaf when you heard words like tax-planning, investment, saving, retirement planning etc. You obviously want to turn religious during old age in post-retirement life  (to repent all your life’s sin) rather than having crores of evil roots with you.

So if you follow this advise, this is a sure-shot way to leading a luxurious life. The one lifetime you have, live it King Size.

PS: This post was written in humorous jest, so if you seriously follow the advise, you would not have enough money even to sue me for wrong advise. So get real and serious about your money!!