The difference between someone who is financially secure and someone who is not, often has more to do with avoiding wealth destruction traps than earning a bigger salary or having a windfall.

If you want to be financially free, you need to avoid these wealth-destroying behaviours.

Spending your future savings

When you start working it is so easy to maximise your credit and buy everything you want now.

The problem is that you will pay it back ‒ and then some.

You will spend the next several years paying off things from the past, leaving you with no money to start saving for the dreams you really want to achieve.

The worst debt traps usually involve unmanageable car debt, store cards and credit cards.

Not preparing for emergencies

Emergencies or unexpected expenses are the number one reason people fall into debt.

A big event like losing your job, crashing your car or getting sick can wipe out your savings.

If you want to protect your wealth, have an emergency fund for those day-to-day unexpected events and take out insurance for those less frequent but greater financial catastrophes

Spending too much on that wedding

There are so many things you will want to do as a married couple, like buy a home, travel and start a family.

If you wiped out your savings, or worse, took out debt to pay for the wedding, you will find your dreams of a married life becoming a financial nightmare.

Financial stress is the number one cause of divorce so don’t let your special day ruin the very thing it is supposed to celebrate.

Cashing in when moving jobs

Every time you change jobs and cash out your retirement savings, you set your retirement date back several years.

If you cash in at the age of 30, you reduce your retirement income by one-third. In order to play catch-up you would either have to increase your retirement contribution by 22% or delay your retirement by five years.

The earlier you start and the longer you leave your money, the less you actually need to save.

Investing too conservatively

There are simply not enough paycheques before retirement to fund your retirement years, so you have to invest in an asset that will grow above the rate of inflation.

If you invested 15% of your salary for 30 years in a balanced fund with an average return of 5 percentage points above inflation, you would have double the amount at retirement than if you invested the money in a money market account earning a return in line with inflation.

Rather than chasing the next pay rise, make smart choices with the money you have.