The thing about being in debt, is that its totally destructive. I mean destructive in every sense of the word. It destroys your mood, your finances, your ability to gain credit, your ability to think rationally, your self respect, your social life and left untreated ultimately your life.
I know this for a fact as I have been there, it was a gradual slope for me, it started with a car loan that didn’t really seem to be going away despite the fact that I no longer had the car, then came the wedding and the holiday, which resulted in a huge credit card bill. My overdraft was getting larger and the vicious circle was just getting bigger and bigger by the day. The mortgage was crippling me and I didn’t know where to turn.
Combine this with my head in the sand approach, I was soon delving deeper and deeper into debt. I needed help with my debt.
Now as far as I am concerned there is two types of debt, manageable debt and non manageable debt. Simply defined as debt you can afford to pay each month and debt that spirals out of control.
Luckily, I had never missed a payment on anything in my life, but I was holding on with my fingernails and didn’t have a single penny left to my name each month. I could barely afford to feed myself at work and keep petrol in the car. I woke up one morning and was so depressed, that I had this light bulb moment when I knew that I needed help and not just financially.
Now, I looked at consolidation loans, bankruptcy, IVA and various different debt management companies, but I have to be honest and say that none of those options were for me.
I went for the dig myself out of debt approach, digging myself out day after day the same way that I got into debt in the first place. Where I lived to excess before, I now lived to minimalist.
Here is how I did it and although it was a long hard slog, I did it, I made it, such a weight off my mind and I have maintained my status of being debt free happily ever after.
First step was asking for help, I did this through a well know money saving site where other people could post messages and normal people would provide assistance. Admitting my debt was the hardest part and those people helped me along the way.
Next of all, I had a good look around my house and literally thought to myself, I can live without that, if I hadn’t used it recently, or realistically I could live without it, it went onto Ebay.
What was left over from eBay, I took to the local car boot sale and no matter how small the price, I ditched it. Family and friends donated things for me to take to the boot sale, but they didn’t know the extent of the problem I was in.
I learned how to budget, building a spreadsheet with every last penny of outgoings I had, and every last penny I had coming in. I scrimped to pay every single spare penny I had spare to go towards my debt. I kept a diary of my outgoings and after a month cut out the elements I could live without, taking packed lunches rather than pre-packaged ones from the canteen. Saving the coppers I had in my pocket in a jar on my desk.
When the budget planner was complete, I phoned, emailed and “compared” every outgoing I had to see where I could save money. My new best friend was the price comparison and the cash back websites on the internet. Sky TV was the first to get ditched and almost overnight I was walking around the house turning down the heating and switching off light bulbs.
By this time, I had caught the money saving bug and I was on fire.
However, my biggest lifestyle change, was simply getting into a “Do I need it, or do I just want it” mindset. As soon as I had mastered this, then I knew that I could resist temptation to spend even more.
I took on extra work, writing passages for online companies, my ebaying increased as I was using profits from my sales to now buy other stock. I shifted my credit cards to the longest zero percent deals that I could find and finally I was starting to get somewhere.
Before long I was going to the car boot sales not to sell, but to buy, take it home and get it onto eBay, gumtree, amazon, green metropolis and anything else with a pulse. Nothing was left to waste.
My food shopping bill decreased after I stopped wasting so much and by downgrading my weekly shop from the named brand to the level below. Ie Heinz to supermarket equivalent.
There was not a single area of my lifestyle left unturned, and now that I am debt free I can relax a little and not go at it so hard, but I could never go back to debt. The secret is to stay out of debt, by whatever means necessary, its the best debt solution in the marketplace.
All I have left outstanding is the mortgage and I am still working on a plan to clear that off.