Sale: Add 19 Percent to the Sticker Price

I’ve been seeing so many articles and tips for women regarding finances lately. This is good. We need to be constantly reminded of the importance of financial planning. Here are two sources I found within the past couple of days:

The first piece I found is a video, on iVillage.com showing a young woman and her finances. She gets a wake up call about her credit card and the interest rate she is being charged — 19.24 variable percent. Think about it this way … if you went into a store that charged 19 percent ABOVE the regular selling price, would you buy the item?

Let’s use an example, a purse. You walk into your favorite department store and eye the perfect, must-have bag for fall. It costs $100. At the counter the clerk rings it up:

$100 purse
+ $7.00 (tax, let’s say 7%)
__________________
$107.00
+ 19.24% (credit card interest rate)
_________________________
$127.58 (total price of bag)

I know my methodology is not perfect here, but think about it. Would you ever buy something if you knew you had to pay more than the sticker price? The reality of using a credit card is actually much worse than my purse example because the credit card company charges that 19.24 percent every month, not just once.

We should use this lesson to learn about our own credit and finances. I’ve talked about the importance of this before, and I want to keep finding sources to get the message across to women that we need to know more and to do more with our financial planning.

Here’s another relevant article, coming from today’s “Orlando Sentinel.” Titled, “Women not putting away enough money, experts say,” it begins by saying,

“Women of all ages think about retirement. The problem, experts say, is that most don’t do enough saving for retirement.

And nobody’s sure why.”

Read the full article here.

I have a few other links I’m collecting on this topic; I’ll share them in future posts. For now, read my finances archive.

Disclosure: Previously, I worked for both The Orlando Sentinel and NBC Universal. NBC owns iVillage. These are sites I still visit often so I’ll share relevant information from them every now and then.