My First Brush with Reducing Debt

Before I get into the various posts about how this program helped I am going to talk about what I did before I turned for help.

My husband and I narrowed our debt issues down to three simple steps to help

1: Stop Creating Debt

2: Calculate Your Expenses and Deb

3: Change Your Spending Habits

 

These all seem pretty self explainitory don't they? Well to the average person I guess it is but to us it all went over our heads and we overextended. So we turned to these ideas to help.

1.Stop creating debt!
Easy right? Well you would be surprised how hard that actually turned out to be. Why pay cash for the gas when I can put it on my card, then when the bill pay only make the minimum payment. Hey I am saving money right? Wrong. We realized this and tried to stop using credit when we didn't have to.

2.Calculate your expenses and debt.
We both pulled our full credit reports offline, and from that we calculated our total debt. It piled up so fast. We couldn't believe how much debt we had actually collected over the years, and we had no idea how to actually reduce the debt. That is where the knowledge of statute of limitations comes in.

3.Change your spending habits.
This is a no brainer right? Well not to some. My husband and I tried very hard to change our spending habits. We managed to do this but it was hard. That and we saw very little effect on actually reducing our debt.


These three suggestions are what we thought would help, sadly they didn't. At least not in the fashion we had hoped for. So once again we looked elsewhere to help reduce the debt that was plaguing us.