How debt can affect you

I've paid for this twice already has a very interesting post on why debt stinks. I completely agree with the article, and I've been thinking about the same thing recently.

While we are still keeping our heads in the sand with respect to our debt since e don't have any active credit cards, the concept still applies to the basicfinancial. I get profit sharing with my job, and it is a sizable amount of cash to get at one time. I have never gotten more than I have at once then even my smallest profit sharing my first year. And until this year, it has always meant something fun and something big. While this year we still did use enough of it for fun items like renovating our new houses office, and a couple of other fun items, most of it went towards getting caught up on bills since we had yet to come completely above water from our wedding 6 months prior. That was a massive amount of money and while we were still able to pull it off, it hurt us for quite some time (about 6 months).

But even with can recycling, birthday checks (although those still mostly go to something fun), all of our "extra money" has been going towards bills, and now towards some semblance of an emergency fund. No new computer, or at least computer parts, no new TVs. Just boring financial security. It's tough talking yourself out of spending $20 on some new headphones, or getting a new ipod case, or some other, even inexpensive, item.