Get Me Out Of Debt
Posted by: Tina Gold Post date: November 22nd, 2009
All over the country there are people sitting at their kitchen table feeling depressed asking themselves to get me out of debt so they and their family can be happy again.
When we took out debts thinking they would improve our lives we were not aware of how things could change in the future leading to us struggling to pay the bills. The idea of borrowing the money was to make our lives better so how did borrowing money becoming such a bad thing for our financial health?
So where do you start when you decide it is time to get me out of debt? The very first step for anyone who has any financial problems is to establish how much money you have by constructing an income and expenses sheet. This can be done either on a spreadsheet program or on paper. You can download a free home office package that includes a spreadsheet from openoffice.org. Click the link to read more about it. A new window will openm so you can carry on reading here. OpenOffice is totally free and very comprehensive including a spreadsheet and word processing program.
You can work out your income and expenses on a sheet of paper if you prefer and it is not difficult to do. You need to assemble details of all your outstanding debts and also write down all of your regular costs and payments. These would include insurance payments, transport and anything else you have to pay every month.
Once you have assembled all these documents and bills you can list your monthly outgoings and add them all up to find your total essential expenditure each month. Next we must find out how much income we have each month.
If you have one income in your household from a regular paycheck it is simple enough to work out your monthly income but if there are two or more incomes and some of them are irregular amounts of money you need to average these amounts over a year to get a better idea of household income. Irregular wages mean some months you will have more cash available than others so you should also look at the lowest months income to be sure you can still pay off the bills each month.
Once you know your income and expenditure for each month you can take the expenses away from the income to see how much money is left. If there is no money left you have a big problem. If you have payments you make each month that are non-essential you should consider cancelling whatever the payment is for. If you are paying for cable TV and that extra cost means you can’t pay your rent then you need to establish what your priorities are and adjust your spending accordingly.
If you are saying to yourself, ‘get me out of debt’ you need to take control of your money and change your lifestyle to a more appropriate one for your income. We have all, mostly, been spending more than we should and it is time to reconsider what is truly important in our lives.
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