But What Are You Planning To Do With The Money?

However when the host asked him what he planned to do with the money his answer was quite different from the other callers. In fact to this point all the other callers had talked about spending it on increasing their entertainment spending, going to the movies more or buying something on interest free. He planned to up his payments on the home loan to the same point they were prior to the interest rate drop, thus living on the same amount of money.

It was not only me who was shocked but also the radio presenter. The presenter protested and said "but you have only just said you were struggling financially". In a calm manner the man went on to say that while they certainly were not living in the lap of luxury, they had learned how to survive on what they had coming in. The caller went on to say the drop in salary only 14 months prior had been a massive shock to the system in their household and changed their spending habits overnight. Now their family was used to going with out and he didn't want to go back to old spending patterns. He concluded the call, saying that he had done his figures and if he keeps this increased payment up he will save around $18,000 in interest over the course of the loan.

My hat has to go off to this budget conscious man. However this is not what really stayed and pestered me long after the talk back show had finished. After the man had hung up a deluge of calls came in in with an almost angry overtone in the callers' disgust with this guy's good budgeting ideas. This continued for the better part of an hour and a half. The comments, which where repeated ran along the following lines:

"How can he deprive his family, just terrible."

"$17 is nothing, just spend it."

"You can't afford to put extra on a home loan, not these days."

"We're meant to be spending this extra money to help stimulate the economy."

"Life is for living not putting extra money onto something which will take 25 years to pay off."

As you can see there was quite a bit of backlash to his extra money saving. The host almost welcomed and agreed with these feelings. He too commented saying that $17 a week was almost nothing if you wanted to save it.

In my mind these excuses by other call-in people are making them feel better about their spending patterns. Just because they planned to spend the extra each week, they are looking for people to tell them they are doing the correct thing. They want to feel like their moves are copied and mimicked. Doing something not so smart is always 100% easier when there are a lot of people doing it.

While writing an article about a single call-in phone call is something I normally don't do. This one call would not stop bothering me all week after I'd heard it. The question though is where do you stand on this issue?