Personal finance: Case study – Emotional uncertainties when facing a debt crisis

You are not ready to face any one day when you realise that as soon as you put your foot out of the door, your creditors will start calling you and you have no answers.

You are an emotional wreck filled with fear, anxiety, stress and emotional turmoil on a daily basis and it’s hard to focus on anything, least of all your job or work.

You have made umpteenth promises that you were unable to keep and you know that you have run out of excuses, even though, most of the time you are telling the truth that you have no money to meet your payments.

You feel like you have exhausted all resources for help or advice and you have nobody to turn to, nobody to give you advice.

Perhaps you already know that your situation has advanced to the legal phase and so you are way too overwhelmed to even think about the consequences.

Daily it’s an effort to put up a façade at the office because you live in hope that the debt factor will not reach your place of employment, especially if you are employed because you know the consequences.

You have already been warned at your place of employment to ‘clean up your act or situation’ or the outcome could be more disastrous, like termination and I know this happens.

You have been to the creditors, met with the management, escalated to the senior management but nobody is prepared to listen, the ongoing demand for payments continues in spite of your efforts.

So now, the situation is sheer frustration because you feel like a number, just like someone who has wasted their time and effort to present their situation, with no outcome, contact, response or solution, just a continuous demand for payment.

Your relationships with your family and close friends is  a mess as the word has probably got out that you are in trouble, so those that are not sincere, will slowly move away from you and because we are extremely sensitive beings in this situation, we feel it more than others.

You don’t feel like being social anymore, just work and home which has now created a fair degree of animosity, anger, arguments, strife and a bad situation specifically in the home.

You have lost your zest for life because your mindset is that it could just get worse, or it could not get any worse than what it already is at this time.

You have tried applying for additional credit in the hope that you could save yourself to consolidate all your debt into one monthly payment, but your efforts were unsuccessful as they were declined.

Your health is suffering, you feel tired every day in spite of trying to get a full no of hours or rest and sleep, so you feel miserable and have no zest for life to even try and reach deep inside for any form of inspiration and encouragement that you need. Only, you don’t find it, there is nothing or nobody to support that reach.

You know that this current outcome is your fault because you let it get out of hand, procrastinated and now it’s uncontrollable but you have tried and it seems to you that it is way too late to even dream of getting yourself out of this mess to start living a normal life again.
 

What to do?

There is only one philosophy you should saturate yourself with and that is ‘There is nothing that you cannot overcome, be, do or achieve’ and if you really want it, then start changing the way you view your situation and the people around you.

Once you do that, the situation and the people will change, because the change starts with you.

When you saturate yourself with negativity no matter how hard it gets and you keep beating that old drum, then you are simply calling in ‘more of the same, more of the negativity, strife, anxiety, more creditor calls in greater frequencies, more debt bills, more bad relationships and simply more of what you are beating’ – This is a cold hard fact.

When you fill yourself daily with negativity and all those bad emotions and you have no release valve, then the outcome surfaces in many other ways like illness and bad health, just to mention key conditions. The reason for that is because there is zero release of all this resistance and so you must be affected in some or other way, perhaps not today or tomorrow, but sooner than you think.

So the first step in the right direction is review your condition right now and assure yourself that you need to be feeling good again before you can take any step to action your debt plan.

You cannot activate this plan in a mindset of negativity as it will not work, the effect will be zero and you will accomplish nothing, truth be told.

I am not talking about spending money on frequenting spas or wellbeing centres, I am purely referring to ‘What can I do today to make myself happy and feel some bliss for a change?’

 Have a long bubble bath, give yourself a facial, manicure or go and take a long walk on the beach, buy yourself an ice-cream, sit on the beach and visualise where you want to be in the next three years.

Unplugging is the best therapy and it is free of charge, you just need to discipline yourself to becoming accustomed to this therapy, because it will change your life. It will give you a new perspective, fresh ideas, more inspiration and encouragement to take the bull by the horns and be confident in doing so.

In life, if is the small tokens of spoils that we should appreciate because it transforms us into more rational people, thinkers, doers and not ‘runawayers from our problems’!

I have mentioned in prior articles that disciplining yourself for 20 minutes daily just to quiet your mind, take deep breaths in a tranquil space in your home before you start your day and only this will eliminate the resistance that you get up with in the morning if you went to sleep in that state of mind.

So, before you sleep, read a chapter in a book, thank your Maker for the day and end your night in gratitude and thanks because then you will arise in the same state of mind.

Once you start feeling lighter and better, seek advice from an expert who knows and has been there and secure the best advice you can on how to move forward.

There are many paths on this journey, but they must be taken with the utmost confidence, integrity, honesty, reliability and commitment and only then will you succeed in achieving your goals and objectives.

One key trait in any person that will elevate them from here to there, is always being authentic, a true version of yourself, maintain your standard, be nice to people, reach out and make someone’s day, put the nastiness in your pocket and forget you put it there.

Leave the grudges behind, forget about the faults and bad decisions you made, they are gone and dusted never to be seen again. Just learn from those lessons, take responsibility and ownership and stop playing the ‘blame game’ as all those things do not serve you, they do not prepare you mentally and emotionally for taking this recovery journey.

Forget about revenge, cursing, being mean and nasty to people because what you give out, you get back as sure as the sun is shining.

So, your only job is to feel good every single day, take one step at a time and if you can create this ‘space’ around you, people will start to feel you, they will feel your happiness and joy and want to have a piece of what you discovered. It is contagious and it works, each time, on time, without fail and you have got to believe that!

Remember, no matter how bad it gets, you can change your entire situation by changing yourself, start with you and then the next.

You can walk into a room and change the frequency if you know how to develop a very strong inner power that people can feel, that they like, that they welcome and embrace you as a real true person, maybe for the first time and so you just remain open to receiving that goodness that you are putting out there and it will come back to you in more ways than you imagine.

Debt and facing a debt-crisis is a true, live, real situation and my intentions here today is not to steer you away from what you are facing right now, only to convince you that you can transform that space into something that serves you, more than whatever space you are in right now can do for you, because it’s effect is zero, and the proof is in the current situation you are facing at this point.

So free advice should be well received an embraced in the spirit that it is given, because if I did not apply the same principles to my life, I could not be tendering this advice today.

Your life is in your hands, what you do with it and how you deal with it, is a consequence you must live with now and perhaps forever, so learn to start making good choices for YOU!

[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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