Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Not Budget Like the President

by MC MasterChef

The US Government now has enough debt that it represents $30,000 for every man woman and child in the US. I can’t remember where I read this statistic but it floored me. It’s hard for me to visualize a trillion dollars (How many zeros is that?) but $30,000 is pretty real to me and if you add it up for me and my 4 children that is $150,000 just for my family. Foreign countries aren’t going to have to go to war to take over America, they just need to foreclose.

The President obviously hasn’t read The Simple Dollar or No Credit Needed. Spending several trillion dollars more than you make is just bad business and every year it grows larger. If we were to apply this to our personal budgets or even our business budgets, we would be bankrupt in a very short time.

Borrowing Money to Pay Bills. It’s a pretty simple concept that borrowing money to pay your bills every month is a really bad idea. How many of us would pay our mortgage with our credit cards on an ongoing basis. Why do we so willingly accept that our country should be run this way?

No thought to debt reduction. Our government seems to be in spend mode with no thought to reducing the debt. Maybe the Congress should read about snowflaking or debt snowballs or even the Rapid Debt Repayment Plan.

No Emergency Fund. We don’t seem to have a National Emergency Fund although the government seems to want to use our Social Security Fund as one. It’s like you and I having a 401(k) and borrowing all the money out of it. It may be a short term solution but if used as a long term, you are going to find yourself without a retirement fund at all.

Not a Sign of Frugal Living on Capital Hill. I don’t hear the politicians talking much about how THEY could save us money. We all know that it’s the little things add up and kill our personal spending plans. You don’t hear much from those in Washington about car pooling or brown bagging or even turning the lights off when you leave the office.

All in all, our Government sets a very bad example of how to run a home (and it is our home, right?) or a business (and it’s our business too because we support it). So I suggest that all Presidential candidates be forced to take a course in Personal Finance and maybe they would start applying it to our government as well.

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