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By Bruce D Hunter
Debt may be the most stressful thing that we humans have to endure in this day and age. We no longer have the worries of those before us in the past. We don't have to go out hunting for our food; we simply walk down to the grocery store and get it. We have ample shelter, running water, and just think about it, toilets in the home. If you think about it carefully we are sitting in the laps of luxury and we don't even know it.
 But, there is that one evil stress that seems to be haunting so many of us these days which is the big fat D-word...DEBT!
The sad part is that though it's not always easy - and there really are some hardship cases out there - we often create our own hell with debt. Part of this is that most of us were not educated in money matters because they don't teach money management or solution in school. We often go the same route of our parents or even worse, since these days we're more tempted and probed to spend than our parents ever were.
Spending is perhaps the biggest obstacle to fixing our debt problems, and should be one of the things that we grasp at first. It's very important to first work on ourselves when trying to find a solution to our debt, and find out where are own detriments and bad habits are rather than running first to someone else to help us just so we can repeat the cycle. This is often the step that most people unfortunately bypass because it's actually the most important step to take.
The first thing that you should do is pinpoint your exact problem. It's usually a problem of overextending ourselves financially. We spend more than we earn. There are actually two ways to fix this problem - one being to earn more money somehow, and the other to control our spending better. However the first step should be to learn to control your spending because often times earning more just seems to give you a license to spend more and the cycle continues.
To truly create a way out of debt you need to setup a money management system, which simply means to track everything you spend, down to the penny. This may seem tough at first, especially if you spend a lot on little things, but this shows you exactly where your money is going, and usually when you see it on paper it becomes more real to you. That's your first task of your debt solution.
You also have to get rid of the plastic. Cut up all of your credit cards except for maybe one for emergencies (and by emergency I don't mean pizza on Friday night or a night out with the girls on Saturday night). Emergencies are emergencies...your car breaks down and you have to get to work, that's an emergency! An even better solution to this problem, which comes from money management and debt guru Dave Ramsey, and his best selling book "Total Money Make Over", is to quickly and as fast as you can (even if it means selling your precious comic book collection) save up a $1,000 emergency fund, and put it somewhere that it's not easy to get to, but isn't tied up so that you can't use it in a pinch.
You next need a budget that everyone in the household can agree with, and you need to stick to that budget. This means that you need to list all of your essential expenses such as rent, food, electric bill, and transportation as well as budgeting a little "mad money" or entertainment money. Now hang it up somewhere you see it everyday and stick to it like glue.
Now it's time to tackle your bills. The best way is to get all of your debt together and start paying the smallest ones first. As you pay off one debt, take the money that you were spending on that debt and add it to the next one and so on. This is the best solution system because it begins to work very quickly and you actually see it going away instead of chipping away at the stone for years and years.
There are things that you can do when looking for a debt solution when all of the above has failed.
One of those is to go through a Consumer Credit Counseling program where on your behalf, a company will go to bat for you and start negotiating your debts with the creditors, often getting you a better deal on interest rates, as well as helping keep the collection agencies off your back and from ruining every dinner you try to sit down for.
Your next solution option would be a consolidation loan. This is basically when you take out one big blanket loan to cover all of your debt and you pay just one monthly fee instead of a bunch of smaller fees. You often get a better deal on interest this way, but of course you want to save this as one of your last options. If that doesn't work then you can try for settlement, which is basically a legal settlement on your debts for a lower amount that you can pay off right there.
This is one of the tougher ways of fixing our debt because though you're getting money taken off of it, you often have to pay it off in one chunk to get the deal, and it still looks pretty bad on your credit report.
But it's not as bad as your last option which is bankruptcy. Bankruptcy should be a total last resort, and you should seek legal guidance if you're going to file for bankruptcy because the bankruptcy laws are quickly changing.
So your debt doesn't have to be a problem for the rest of your life if you will just figure out where your problems stem from, and come up with a simple but effective debt solution plan much like what I've laid out for you here.
CORE Magazine is a leading online resource for a debt solution. Visit our unsecured debt consolidation section now to get free access to information on debt problems.
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