Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
modify your expenditures before it’s too late.
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Phrase: Keep up appearances
How important is it for you to keep up appearances?
Do you care about maintaining a particular impression of wealth or well-being?
I, myself, don’t really care about those things, but then again, I’ve never had a high level of wealth to begin with.
Keeping up appearances means you feel it’s important to maintain an outward appearance that everything is fine even if it isn’t.
When people try to keep up appearances, even though they are going through tough times financially, they feel it is essential to maintain an outward appearance that everything is fine.
Sometimes doing that only serves to make their financial situation even worse.
From my experience, people do two things that cause them financial hardship.
The first is getting too far ahead of themselves by spending money they don’t have.
University graduates with new jobs often do this.
They become intoxicated with their paychecks and temporarily think they are rich.
I say temporarily because they quickly realize once they make their own way, the money goes even more rapidly on living expenses.
Fancy cars, nice restaurants and new clothes quickly become secondary to utilities, rent and health insurance.
The second is that once their financial situation changes for the worse, they fail to modify their expenditures immediately.
Keeping up appearances of better times after you have lost your job, experienced a health scare, or inflation makes your previous lifestyle prohibitively expensive is a sure way to lose everything.
Immediately after experiencing a sudden drop in income, people should adjust their spending habits instead of keeping up appearances.
Sure, people may notice if you don’t purchase a new car every few years, but they’ll definitely notice if you lose the house to bankruptcy.
Don’t keep up appearances; keep up your payments.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 9th-grade education (age 15).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 56.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.