Living Debt Free
Written by admin on July 16th, 2010You know what it’s like to sit down at your desk with a pile of bills that seems 6 inches thick. Every single dime in your paycheck is gone and spoken for well before you put it in your bank account. While the idea of living debt free sounds fantastic, you may not know how to get there, or if it is even possible for you. The good news is that living debt free is absolutely possible for anyone, it’s just going to take some dedication and patience.
The key to living debt free lies in financial discipline. If you have too much debt it means that you spend too much money. That’s all there is to it really, you can blame it on a lot of things, and there are often situations, such as illnesses that arise, that are completely out of your control. But most people are deeply in debt because they are spending money that isn’t theirs, on things they just can’t wait to have.
In just a few years, most of the junk you bought is already in the trash, but that debt is still there. Not only that, it’s growing faster than ever because of interest. The good news is that there is a very simple solution for getting out of debt. Living debt free means following a couple of very simple rules for as long as it takes to pay off your debt and get on the right financial footing.
The first step is to throw your credit cards in the blender. Cut them up, burn them ceremonially, let the dogs chew on them, throw them in the garbage disposal, or whatever else it takes to make sure that you never use them again. The only way to get out of debt is to begin by not ever getting in any more debt.
The next step is to begin downsizing your budget. In order to pay off your debt and live debt free you’re going to have to free up some extra money from your paycheck to pay extra on the debts you already have. The only two ways to do this are to increase either your income or decrease your expenses so that there is extra money available to pay off debts. A combination of both will work best of course, it just depends on how fast you want to be debt free.
Once you stopped spending, and started paying off your current debts, the only thing left is the discipline of patience. You simply must make a commitment to living debt free or you will never make it. It’s going to take a few years, but once you’re done with it that old stack of bills will be much smaller and you will be able to keep a lot more of the money you earn.
