Credit Cave

Now that you have acknowledged that you are in debt, the second stage of getting out of debt is planning your escape.  Don’t take it lightly, I mean escape when I say it.  Debt is such a heavy burden to carry, it gets you down and saps your will until you reach your lowest.

Meta Spending Tips
To break the cycle of being in debt and adding to it you need to stop your spending, which sounds easier than you might think.  If you want out of debt then you’ve got to stop adding to it, so here are a few tips to help you on the way.

A word of warning here.  None of these tips are particularly ground breaking on their own, but when you take them together they are a very powerful way of changing your spending habits.

• Adopt a new attitude to money.  By that I mean you must become frugal, you want to hold onto you money.  It is your money, get that into your head.  You need to to hold onto as much of it as possible.
• If possible consolidate your credit card debt onto a single 0% interest card.  This will mean you will no longer be spending money paying off interest that can otherwise be used to pay off your balance.
• Hack your lifestyle.  Start cutting out costs like those lunches out, concerts and clothes shopping sprees.  None of this will help you get out of debt, so stop it.
• Think laterally round a problem.  When your car decides to break down, don’t jump at the first solution as this may be the most expensive.  Ask friends and family for help until you find the answer to your problem.
• Break it down.  Looking at your whole life makes the idea of saving money hard to comprehend because there are so many facets to modern living.  Break down your life into components such as eating, entertainment, transportation, communication etc.  Then go through each part of your life with a fine comb and start ripping out things you don’t need to spend on.
• Start reading.  You aren’t the first person to have a spending problem.  There are tons of great blogs where you can read up on other people and their personal finance experiences.  Learn from how they stopped spending and got themselves out of debt.
• Track your spending.  The more cold data you can gather on your spending patterns the easier it is to spot trends and eradicate overspend.  There are plenty of online applications you can use such as  Expenses Tracker,  Pear Budget and DimeWise to name but a few.

Recommended Reading
Here are a few resources to help you save money.  There will be a degree of overlap, but if you can get through them all you’ll find lots of ways to stop spending.

• 118 ways to save money in college (Scolarships Around The US)
• 101 ways to save money (CreditCave)
• 66 ways to save money (Pueblo, CO Citizen Information Center)
• 20 strange ways to save money (Bankrate)
• How to stop accumulating debt (Binary Dollar)
• The psychology of spending (Get Rich Slowly)

This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Debt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.