Hi Gail: I watch your show every morning while I get ready for work .... I have a question. When you tell the couples how much they are overspending every month .... is that just credit card debt or is that overdraft .... or both? Just wondering. Thank you.

Giselle, when I tell people how much they’re overspending by, it’s based on the budget work-up that I’ve done showing the shortfall between what they’re making and what they’re spending. Sometimes  the overspending shows up on their credit cards, sometimes in their overdraft. Sometimes you can’t see it because they’ve refinanced their mortgage to repay debt and so now it’s buried in their mortgage. Sometimes they’ve been playing the balance transfer game, moving the debt around and pretending they’ve paid it. To me it doesn’t matter where they’ve put it, the fact that they have a shortfall in their budget is the big concern since the overspending won’t go away till they face up to what they’re doing wrong.