Rising prices of essential commodities like gas and food have made pinching a penny and stretching a dollar absolutely essential habits. Most of us live from paycheck to paycheck, and when the pay stays the same but expenses increase, there’s a lack of balance that sends you into debt in the blink of an eye. Now there are two ways in which you can consciously protect your financial status:

• Stretch your dollar by controlling expenditure on what you spend
• Make sure your pennies are not pinched by preventing expenditure on what you don’t spend

Illustrating further...

The first point is simple enough to understand. If every member of each family makes a conscious effort to cut down on unnecessary expenses, they’d be pretty surprised at the amount saved each month.

Consider:

• Buying groceries in bulk or using coupons
• Walking instead of driving
• Eating at home
• Skipping your usual cup of coffee and doughnut at the corner shop
• Conserving electricity by switching off lights and appliances when not needed, turning down the thermostat on your heater and washing clothes in cold water.
• Buying secondhand stuff when possible
• Renting a DVD instead of going out to the movies
• Quitting smoking and moderating your alcohol intake
• Holding off vacations till your finances are back on track

The second point is meant to emphasize the need to be careful with the technological advances that control your money, like your credit and debit cards. How would you like to wake up one day and discover that you’re being charged for an amount withdrawn from an ATM in India or Sri Lanka (if you even know where the small island country is)? Your first reaction would be to rub your eyes and wonder if you really did take an exotic vacation and forget all about it, or if this was something out of the Twilight Zone!

Well, this is exactly what happened to more than half the people in a sleepy little town in a corner of the United Kingdom who were rudely jolted from their laidback existence by reports of their credit cards being used to withdraw money from ATMs in India, Sri Lanka, Denmark and the Dominican Republic. While the police are still investigating the matter, speculation is rife that the cards were illegally copied at a local gas station run by a man of Asian origin and later cloned to be sold to thieves.

The lesson to be learned from this episode is that this could so easily happen to any of us. Unless we take additional care to protect both our debit and credit cards from being surreptitiously copied by fraudsters, we are liable to suffer heavy financial damages. It’s time we woke up to the dangers of electronic theft and became more careful with the way we use our cards. Making sure the card never leaves your sight is one way to ensure that it’s not copied. Never give out your pin number or leave it written down anywhere. Protect the verification number on your credit card or thieves could end up using it to make online purchases and run up a huge bill.

Money does not grow on trees, so be careful with what you have; explore options to make it grow even as you look at ways to cut costs and prevent what you have from being stolen.