BillsIQ: Better Than the All-Ramen Diet

Just about everyone is familiar with the college student-ramen link - supposedly college students all end up living on the stuff for lack of money to buy better food. I ate a ramen packet or two when I was in college, but the whole starving student thing... I don't think I saw that anywhere. (I did see a lot of VERY well fed students though.)

I have known a few people who did pursue this diet outside of a college setting, however, and it was because they needed to budget tightly on account of having too much debt. Rather than buy real food and give up things like beer and video games, they gave up on real food and kept buying the other stuff in an effort to save money to pay down debts. I suggested to one of them once that perhaps seeking debt help might be a better idea, but the suggestion fell on deaf ears. At least until after the first month of the all-ramen diet.

Debt consolidation has been something I've used before rather than extreme (extremely stupid) measures like those described above. I didn't use a formal service, I just moved everything to a fixed, low rate credit card. If the noodle chomping folks I knew were to consolidate debt, too, maybe they could have choices other than beef, pork, or chicken flavor. In one case, I think the guy should have just sought debt relief since he was so far in the hole that no amount of boiled noodles could save him.



There's lots of help out there for this sort of stuff, like at Bills IQ. Instead of reaching for those dried noodle packets, you might search out some other strategies first. There's a lot of useful advice there on this topic and more, and you don't even have to boil it first.