Getting into debt doesn’t mean that you are a bad person or that you are some sort of moron who racks-up debt without care. It’s all too easy to get yourself into an uncomfortable place from a personal financial point of view. It’s what steps you take to deal with that situation if it does arrive that is all important.
Living your life on credit is an easy trap to fall into – especially when there are so many companies out there who are prepared to offer you a credit line without taking into consideration your personal circumstances.
Exploring your options
When you are in between a rock and a hard place concerning money, it’s a case of dog eat dog. You will do whatever you have to in order to survive. But at some point in time, you have to get real. Continuing down an ever-increasing spiral of debt will eventually kill you. You need to know what options are open to you and which path is best to start that climb out of trouble.
Having made the decision that you are going to find a way to get out of debt and back on to a level path, a good place to start is by getting some professional advice. You don’t have to talk to a financial advisor. A lot of people find this a difficult thing to do. But you can make use of the internet by reading informative articles like this one on the Wonga.za website.
The basics of getting out of Debt
Getting out of debt means doing two things. First, you must cut out any non-essential purchases. The best way of doing this is to draw up a personal budget and prioritise what you spend your money on. Kerbing your expenditure will hopefully stop you from getting into further debt. It may even allow you to start paying off the debt if you have sufficient funds left over after buying your essentials.
For the majority of people who get themselves into debt, they will need to find extra money to settle their indebtedness. One way is to borrow money from friends or family, but only if you can assure yourself, you will be able to afford to pay them back. If you can’t, it is likely that you will ruin your relationship.
Borrowing responsibly
The alternative path you can choose is to take out a loan. Now at first, you might think this is a crazy idea as you will be increasing your indebtedness. But that is only true if you cannot afford the repayments. If you can (and you need to add the repayment sum into your personal budget to make sure) this is a legitimate way out.
If you have lots of different debts, taking out one loan to pay them all off makes management of your finances much simpler. It can also mean that one single repayment may cost you less than the sum of a number of different repayment plans.
Remember that debt is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the majority of people around the globe take on some form of debt at some stage of their lives. In fact, here in South Africa, more people have loans than jobs.
The key factors with any loan are to borrow responsibly from an official NCR approved source and to ensure that you manage your debt within your means.