When Anjali got a promotion last year, she didn’t intend to change anything about her life, even though her new position (associate art director at an ad agency) came with a 20 percent raise. She’s 28 and had never been able to save much money, so she figured she’d finally start. “I always felt like I was scraping by, and I wanted to have more security,” she says.
But within a few months, she was struggling to pay her bills again, and she couldn’t figure out why. If anything, she was going out less because of the demands of her new job, and she hadn’t made any splashy purchases — just a few online orders, mostly clothing to wear to the office. When she looked at her bills, though, she realized she was shopping way more than she thought.
