One of the things I like to talk about when I travel the country speaking about the principles and habits of successful wealth-building is learning to recognize and avoid what I call poverty traps: behaviors and ways of thinking that sabotage our ability to increase our net worth and build wealth. The poverty trap I'm going to talk about today is going to hit close to home for many people in The Doug Banks Morning Show and Black Enterprise families this morning: Too many of us are working and spending to look rich instead of saving and investing to build wealth.

I ran across a prime example at a Black Enterprise Wealth Initiative presentation I delivered at a conference in Houston earlier this year. A young woman came up to me to tell me that she had recently graduated from college and had landed a decent job right out of school, making about $30,000 a year. She was single with no kids, and had flown to Houston from Atlanta to attend my presentation because she wanted advice on how to get rid of credit card debt she had begun to accumulate in college and to catch up on her student loans. She was so stressed out about her debt burden that she was considering filing for bankruptcy.