My Journey to Eliminate Debt

One of the things that I think is most important for any debt reduction plan is setting priorities. And to do that successfully we need to be really honest about what our priorities are. Not fool ourselves by doing what everybody else is doing. Feeling stuck in financial misery is a crappy place to be!

If a plan is to be successful it needs to be what suits you, not what someone else thinks should suit you. Once you know what your priorities are, then you can set realistic goals. So I am going to post some exercises over the next week for setting priorities. Get out some paper and start writing:

What is causing me the most financial stress right now? Write it down, as much as you can, time to spill.

Are any of these causing you stress? Write it down, add anything else not listed here.

• collection agencies calling
• fighting with spouse over finances
• unpaid, overdue bills
• credit card debt
• can't pay mortgage
• facing foreclosure
• unemployment
• illness
• not enough money for retirement
• facing bankruptcy
• not enough money to live the lifestyle I want
• want to be rich and I'm not
• feel overwhelmed & don't know where to start
• business failure
• not enough money for food, utilities safe housing
• can't give my kids as much as I would like
• can't give my kids basic nesecities of food, health care & safe housing

Now that you have ranked these take a look at the top 3 or 4. Take the time to sit down and write out how this particular problem is affecting your life. Be honest. How is it affecting your health, your relationship with family and friends, your career, your spirituality.

OK now have a think about your current financial position and the history leading up to it. Draw a financial timeline. Take some time and do this thoroughly. Go right back and list the major events that affected your financial position on the timeline. Examples include:

• employment events
• birth of children
• divorce
• marriage
• buy home
• inheritance
• investment decisions
• illness
• accident
• family crisis
• business start up
• business difficulty
• natual events (fire, flood, storm etc)
• taxation problems
• fraud, legal issues
• major lifestyle choices (private school, overseas holiday etc)

Now go and make a cuppa and take a deep breath. Good on you for being brave enough to face the truth.

Look at the timeline & mark what you could control and what you couldn't control. Too often we beat ourselves up for things that are out of our control. Life is not fair and bad things do happen to good people. Job loss, illness, theft, business failure.

Blaming yourself for things that are out of your control only makes you feel even worse & you need to stop doing it. So make a list of what contributed to your financial problem and what you could and couldn't control.

So now you have the start of a way out of this mess.

Let go of the guilt over poor choices, it won't help you. So you stuffed up and made some bad choices... welcome to the human race :). You are not a failure for making mistakes.

Start thinking about what is really most important to you, not the Jones, not your employer or your parents.

Thats more than enough to do in one day! I will write some more to this exercise later tonight.

have a good day and remember, you are not stuck and you can change this.