It’s irresistibly tempting.

My head spins non-stop with how-can-I afford-this thoughts.

Since the iPhone 4 launched [in India], I’ve had these financially-destructive thoughts:

• Dip — no, make that dive — into my emergency fund. In a weird way this does count as an emergency because my present phone, a Nokia E52, has had its share of knocks and the outside panel is hanging on by a bare thread.

• Break my next-car-savings (here’s my reasoning for having one) mutual fund investment. Why bother about my next car today?

• Stop contributing to my financial independence/financial freedom fund for a couple of months. It’s just a couple of months right? How bad can that be? And isn’t the whole point of earning to enjoy your today?

• Take a bridge loan from D — at exorbitant micro-finance interest rates!

• Raise cash by selling a bunch of stuff that I own such as my old Acer laptop, my iPod Touch, my digital camera, my wireless printer, etc.

My mind tells me to throw every personal financial rule out! In fact, when the ads came out I fell for their trick — I was so blind that I didn’t realize that one needs to pay the phone’s cost upfront and recover this cost through the 24-month bill discounts. Luckily for me, D was specially vigilant and made me re-read the ad.

Marketing at its brilliance.

And thankfully, I haven’t executed any of these destructive ideas.