It’s Possible to Budget Your Way Out of Debt

It’s 2019.

I’ve just moved my entire life clear across the country. I didn’t have any job prospects. I didn’t even have an apartment to call my own. Juxtapose that against the fact that I was a fresh university grad who had just traveled to more places in that year than my entire life combined.

It was my best, worst year ever.

I share that context to illustrate just how complex life was at the time. So much can be going right in your life, but one string of misfortune can start to send you down a path of destruction. For me, that manifested through my finances.

I was told throughout my life that debt was bad. I was taught to guard that sacred credit score with my life because that was the key to accessing many of the privileges afforded to adults. And in many ways that is true.

• If you commit the cardinal sin of tarnishing your credit, it will impact where you can live, regardless of your income.
• It will impact your ability to obtain a vehicle to help you generate income.
• In some cases, it will even impact your ability to be employed by firms that look at credit to judge your level of responsibility.

Armed with all of that knowledge, I still found myself in a precarious situation financially, and it was all my fault. I felt defeated. I felt like a failure already in my early 20s.

My saving grace, however, is that I picked up a key skill in college that serves me until today.

The skill I’m talking about is the ability to objectively say,

“There may be other people/things responsible for putting me in this position. But, it is solely my responsibility to make sure I don’t stay here.”

I believe this is a key mindset shift that everyone needs to adopt if they want to have any chance at steering their lives in a more favorable direction. We all have some blame for how our lives turn out. And even if you are truly a product of an external environment, you cannot rely on external factors to save you from it. The responsibility solely lies in you to dig deep and find out how to change for the better.

So that’s what I did. I started small. I started with limited knowledge. And I started with very limited resources. Most importantly, I was honest with myself.

And almost 4 years later, I’m better for it.

Watch this video to see the method I used to start getting out of debt.