One thing that I noticed early on when I was a young adult was that my parents were not very good at managing their money.  It really came down to my father’s need to keep up with the Joneses and irrespective of of the cost, he would buy every toy that his neighbors and friends had.

The result of this overspending put my parents deeply in debt.  I tried to explain to them how to reduce credit card debt by following debt diet plans, but they wouldn’t listen.  Part of that problem was due to the fact that my father believed that he was always right and could never be wrong.

Five years later, things took a turn for the worse.  My father’s overspending had exhausted all of their savings and they were having difficulties making the minimum payments on their credit cards.  At this point, I told him that they need to go see a poor credit debt consolidation counselor before they lost everything that they owned.

They still haven’t quite recovered from my father’s overspending, but at least they are slowly digging themselves out of the hole.