5 ways to avoid poverty and becoming poor

April 29, 2010 by Victorino
Filed under Personal Finance Tips

Who wants to become poor? Who wants to become a prisoner of poverty? Probably, no one wants to become poor. We dream of riches. We desire it not only for our own happiness and consumption. We want it also for our family and maybe for our country. But being rich is not an easy task and avoiding poverty is not a goal that is usually achieved. However, avoiding ourselves to become poor lies in our own hands. The following are five tips to secure ourselves and avoid financial deficiency.

1. Avoid vices
Drunkenness, gluttony, womanizing, gambling, and the likes will surely make us poor. These things destroy our financial budget and even ruin our discipline – a virtue that is very important in our way to riches and success. These bad habits are proven to make our pockets run dry. So if you want to avoid poverty, you need to avoid these negative routines and preserve your self-control.

2. Earn right
Financial deficiency comes when people don’t have sufficient earnings that can cover their expenses. Therefore, to avoid such deficiency, you need to earn adequately. One way to assure that you can have good income is to have a stable job. Having a stable job means completing a college degree or post graduate degree. This means that education is very important to overcome poverty. Hence, if your are still in college, be sure that you will study well, graduate with honors, and earn an outstanding educational background that will entice big employers. Another way to earn right is to do business strategically. If you are the type of person who doesn’t rely on employers, you can do business successfully. A successful businessman is one who is diligent, disciplined, intelligent (who does research), intuitive, patient and innovative.

3. Spend wisely
Having a sufficient income will not be enough if we spend extravagantly. Hence, you need to spend wisely and avoid wasteful expenses. One way to control our spending habit is to record and monitor it. We can make budgets to plan our expenditures and check if we spend below or beyond those budgets. We can also analyze our spending pattern to create solutions on how we can manage them. This also means we need to have self-control and other virtues that will stop us from spending wastefully. We can prioritize our basic needs so that we only buy the most vital things and avoid unimportant things. The goal is to not spend beyond our earnings and to not forget our savings.

4. Save with interest
Saving is good but saving with interest and earnings is better. If you hide your money without earning, you will be defeated by inflation. Hence, if you are really serious in saving your money, save it from inflation and put it in investments like time deposits, mutual funds, debt investments and equity investments.

5. Have confidence
This may not sound financially, but if you are really determined to defy poverty, you need to be confident and be positive to reach that objective. Worries and excessive doubts are the top destroyers of any goals. Hence, don’t stop believing and doing every right thing to escape from being poor.