Personal Finance: Your 'Financial Freedom' year starts now…

Even without an abundance of income, a debt-free life allows your brain to explore the possiblities, because that is the significance of ‘Financial Freedom’.

You already know how to get out of debt – Spend less than you make and apply the extra money on your debt balance. It’s that simple.

Like New Year’s Resolutions every year you start with good intentions mostly to organise and improve your life, get everything sorted out, be disciplined and for those in debt, you promise yourself you will action your debt recovery plan?

Then you realise you are already off target due to holiday spending.

Right there you should have curbed excessive habits pertaining to money, because the extra you found yourself with could have been applied to your debt, instead you opted for:

1.     Flying home for the Festive Season to spend it with family and friends;

2.     Buying more gifts than you could afford, in fact you could not afford any in the first place;

3.     Spending more money on entertainment, mostly with plastic;

4.     Splurging at any given opportunity and here the focus is mostly on expats who return home for the holidays where if you live overseas then it’s key to create an impression of all-round well-being and thriving wherever you are living – Not OK!

Know this right here and now that the No 1 key factor that will fully support you to becoming debt-free is being sensible and embracing huge sacrifice in all facets of your existence, because that is what it is going to take to achieve your goals and completing your journey of debt-recovery.

•     Is it going to be easy?

•     Must you learn how to count your pennies?

•     Must you to do without many things you are used to?

•     Must you stay at home weekends, cook your own food, entertain yourself and your family most of the time with ‘home-made’ everything?

•     Must you create your own entertainment and when taking weekend trips prepare most of your food and refreshments instead of buying them?

•     Must you skip all the vacations for the next 3-5 years?

•     Must you scale down on your current living standards?

•     Must you sell personal possessions you love and want to hold onto?

•     Must you sell one car of the two and compromise?

The list can continue infinitum but you get the picture?

Prolonging taking action when facing a debt-crisis is creating more misery in your life.

Even if you got the flights cheap, or discounted meals, or anything else discounted, the raw truth is you could have used that money to reduce one or more of your debts and whilst some of you might say to me ‘Oh come on, we just needed a break!’.

Then seriously, you can take a break like this for the rest of your life but you are going to be taking 2 steps backwards and ½ step forward.

The question I am asking is why would you spend the money you can’t afford only to return and face more problems than you had before leaving and that too with the full knowledge that this would be the case?

What is the logic in this? Why make life more difficult than it already is for you?

The key lesson is you cannot achieve anything great in your life without huge sacrifices and it does not only have to pertain to debt.

When you are not prepared to live on the other side when you find yourself facing problems and you can’t be consistent in your commitment to becoming debt-free and overcoming those hurdles, then:

a.     You won’t grow;

b.     You won’t progress to the next phase;

c.     You have learn’t nothing about progressing in life by overcoming hurdles;

d.     Perhaps you cannot be aligned or find your alignment for your sole purpose in your life;

e.     You never learn to respect, value and appreciate yourself for how far you have come through worse times which moulds you into a special being with unique gifts that can touch and transform the lives of others;

f.     It simply means you can talk the talk but you have not walked the walk because a life of overcoming hurdles and sacrificing to achieve goals has no true monetary value;

When you can say to yourself ‘I am going to do this, I can do this because this is my year,’ then mean it from the core of your being and do something about it.

Right now you have my encouragement and the opportunity to come clean, to transform your life into something with purpose where you have goals to reach and achieve.

So the first step is to ‘Set your Intention’ and meet that commitment you make to yourself because that is the first step to gaining the courage to take this journey step by step until you completed the process.

Rome was not built in one day, neither was your debt accumulated in one month so it is going to take time, sacrifice and commitment to achieve this big goal and if you convince yourself from day one then you start losing your emotional fear and slowly new brighter days will unfold, some with hurdles but you must hold onto the new strength you acquired to complete the journey.

Key point is only you can do this journey nobody else can do it for you so we are only into Week 2 of the 2016 New Year where you already lost a day, so take heed not to lose another one!

[Note 1:  Theda Muller is a UAE-based author of two books: Embrace Financial Freedom Volume One: 10 Proven Ways To Release Debt And Emotional Fears In Today’s Economy, and Volume Two: Releasing Fear And Bouncing Back From A Debt Crisis.She also conducts webinars and workshops on debt recovery.]

[Note 2: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect in any way, the views of Emirates 24|7. Readers are advised to carry out their own due diligence before taking any decision.]

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