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