Welcome back to the one and only Your Loan Depot blog space, where we do our best to solve your short-term, emergency cash issues while educating you about how you can more effectively manage and save your earnings so that you won’t find yourself needing a payday loan again any time soon.
To be clear, we aren’t in the business of judging anyone for needing a payday loan, a bad credit loan, or a car title loan in Texas. It’d be pretty silly if we did, seeing as how our livelihood is based on providing said loans to good folks in Texas. However, on the other side of the coin, we hope our readers and customers understand that we don’t want our customers to come back to us in need of fast cash over and over again. Ideally, you use the payday loan (or whatever type of fast cash loan you end up going with) to get your head above water, financially speaking.
Whether you need to work with a payday lender like Your Loan Depot to cover medical expenses, for an emergency car repair, or to bridge the gap between paychecks to cover rent — it’s not our concern! Our concern lies in helping you get the emergency cash you need when more typical avenues, such as banks or credit unions, have denied you the money you need.
How To Save Money To Buy Your First Home
All this being said, we also want to help our readers with their budgeting for the long term. In part one of this two-part series, we took the opportunity to list three tips to help you start saving to become a homeowner. And while we’d encourage you to go back and read part one in its entirety, we’ll provide you with a brief summary of what was discussed below:
- Figure out how much you need – Most people think their down payment will be more or less 20 percent of the total purchase price of the house. But these days, that’s not always the case. You might qualify for special types of home loans (VA loans, for instance), or you might be able to find a bank that can offer down payment requirements as low as 3 percent!
- Go after credit card debt like there is no tomorrow – We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again on this blog — credit card debt needs to be beaten into the ground with both fists, people! It can destroy your livelihood if you let it fester unattended. The longer you let it lie there, making minimum payments that do almost nothing, the worse the problem becomes.
- Reduce your expenses – Here’s another drum we’ve been banging for some time now. Again, we aren’t here to judge, but we aren’t here to pull our punches either. Pretty much everyone on the planet can take stock of their spending habits and find at least a few areas where they could cut back. In terms of daily expenses, it might be your eating out for lunch at work almost every day. It could be cigarettes, the casino, or racking up a hefty bar tab from time to time. Of course, it could be other things too — everyone has their Achille’s heel! Ultimately, we all could find ways to save more money, it’s just an unpleasant thing to do. Bite the bullet and plan for your future!
Now that we’ve established a few of the basics covered in part one, we’ll move along to today’s tips!
What Kind Of House Do You Want?
Newsflash: there are many different types of homes out there. There are big homes and little homes, single family homes and multi-family homes. There are condos and ranch houses, townhouses and fixer-uppers. There are expensive houses and more affordable houses as well.
Alright, we are done with the pseudo nursery-rhyming for now — we hope you enjoyed it. Our point is that the more you narrow down the type and price range of your home search, the easier the search will be. We aren’t able to tell you what house you should be dreaming of, either. If you want the classic, American vision of the white picket fence with apple trees in the front yard, great! If your priority is to find something more cost effective for you and yours, we certainly understand that point of view as well.
Our advice is for you to decide what you want so that you can then map out how you will arrive there. Having clear-cut goals is so important when the goal takes so much time to accomplish.
Learn How To Budget
Oh, adulting. It’s fun, isn’t it? You would have thought that being an adult means you can do whatever you want, whenever you want to. In reality, it feels like a lot less freedom and a lot more cumbersome responsibility. At least, that’s how it feels at certain times.
Responsibility doesn’t have to be depressing, though; it’s all a matter of perspective! If you can get yourself to focus on the positive possibilities rather than the unpleasant parts, doing something as cumbersome as “budgeting” doesn’t have to be cumbersome at all!
More practically, here’s a few tips to guide your newfound art of budgeting. Number one, we recommend putting retirement savings on hold for now. If you don’t have any retirement savings, congrats! You are one step ahead of the curve (we kid, but in all honesty, you don’t have to worry about it at this point). If you do have a retirement fund, such as an IRA or a 401(k), it’s worth mulling over the idea of ceasing allocating a portion of your paycheck to that fund so that you can use that income to start saving for a down payment. If you do go this route, it should only be temporary, so don’t get the idea that we are telling you to mortgage your future for the short-term. However, over the course of a few months or even a few years, this should help you on your way toward home ownership!
Use The Technological Tools At Your Grasp
The essential part of budgeting is getting a better feel for your finances and expenses so that you can figure out where you can cut back to set aside funds you can save for the future. Whether that future involves buying a house or doing something else with the money, it’s up to you.
Regardless, there are technological tools that can help make budgeting a more easy, straightforward process. In our experience, half the reason people don’t budget isn’t because they are not willing to cut back on certain expenses, but it’s taking the time itself that folks just aren’t interested in. Well, the year is not 1995, which means you don’t have to bust out your checkbook and old-timey calculator and spend the evening squinting through your bifocals.
Instead, there are apps which can help you budget in incredible ways. For instance, Digit has a platform which lets users opt to daily save a predetermined amount of money automatically! You can set it so that it still makes a difference but it won’t hurt you in a dramatic way. This way, you don’t have to worry about blowing through your entire paycheck and not having any left over for savings. You save as you go!
A second option is to sign up for Acorns, which rounds all of your purchases up to the nearest dollar, upon which it puts the difference into an investment account for you. Saving a bit of spare change every day is nothing to turn your nose up at, so make sure you look into your options if you aren’t interested in budgeting the old-fashioned way!
Look Out For Part Three!
Would you believe that we aren’t yet done listing tips just yet? Believe it! Look out for part three in the near future, and be sure to give us a call if you are in need of a payday loan in Texas. We’d love to help you out!
