Hello, my neighbors. My name is Jesse Meekam, and this is podcast number 101 of

you need a budget, where we teach you four rules to help you stop living paycheck to

paycheck, get out of debt and save more money.

A bit ago, Mark, Wineham's blogger, wrote a post entitled when you finance anything you finance everything and I think it got a lot of

blog readers thinking and I wanted to also share it with you podcast listeners that perhaps

did not catch it on the blog. If you haven't subscribed to the blog you may consider it.

Mark posts some pretty insightful, sometimes a bit controversial, but always good reading.

And he's learning as he goes and man has he learned a lot.

In the process I think a lot of blog readers have learned a lot from him.

His post talks about basically the fact, a very true principle that if you are in debt, then when you buy something,

you are not using that money to pay off your debt, therefore you are financing that purchase at your highest rate of interest.

If you have a credit card where you pay 10%, a mortgage where you pay, they're so low now, 4%, a student

loan where you pay 2 and 3 quarters percent, and you decide to buy that new iPad mini with red under spic. And you have financed that I.

And you have financed that Ipad mini with Redna Display.

Then you have financed that Ipad Mini with Red and Display

at your highest rate of interest at that 10%

on that credit card.

If you are carrying any type of debt balance,

then everything you do has to run against the opportunity cost of paying it.

Now you could look at investing in the same way. My old accounting professor came and talked to us

and it was part of my accounting 200 course and he basically said you have opportunity costs that you have to address.

The opportunity costs of not paying off your debt is one, the opportunity costs of not

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