The best way to get out of debt is to make more money.
It doesn’t matter whether you make money online in your underwear or slug furniture, sit in an office or dig ditches all day but every time I have been in debt the only way I made any progress was when I applied myself and worked more, or worked harder or smarter – or sometimes all three and landed a better job.
The easiest way to get out debt one might argue would be with bankruptcy – but that depends what your idea of getting out of debt easily is. Bankruptcy sucks. There’s lawyers and trustees and courts and procedures and you end up having to hurt somebody you owe that could really use the money.
Let’s say you owe thousands on your credit cards and then maybe you list your landlord as you’re a few months behind, and then maybe you owe I don’t know – your accontant. The banks don’t really care. True, the recent recession has shown that if everybody goes bankrupt at the same time then companies cut back and then it’s quite possible you could affect somebody with a job. But for the most part for most banks and big credit card companies, they have factored in for a percentage of the people that they loan the funds to will never pay it back – for a multitude of reasons, and the banks will keep on humming along.
But it’s the little guy that you owe the small amount to, that got hit with your bankruptcy too. And the small (relatively) amount that you owe him really does make a difference he or she really could use that payment and it’s quite possible that when you went bankrupt you also affected somebody else either directly or indirectly.
And that’s why I don’t like bankruptcy as a method to use for getting out of debt. Because you could hurt somebody else too. One could argue that ‘business is business’ and it’s all a cost of doing business but that’s besides the point. The result of your poor fiscal choices could not only hurt yourself, but somebody else too.
And that’s why I’m a fan of making more money to get out of debt. You can only save so much money . Yes, it’s true that coupons are a good thing and that you should save as much money as you can to get out of debt fast but making more money is also a good way and that’s why I’m still here inside plunking away on a keyboard to make more money online so that I can pay my debt off faster and be out of debt and sipping a drink with an umbrella someday.
Hard work is the answer. If you work hard now you see the results later. Some days might just be a waste of time – you went to an interview where nobody calls you back or you make a website that hardly gets any visits ( I could write a book). But if you keep at it, you will get out of debt. It might require some uncomfortable living situations for a bit and long hours where really you’d like to enjoy that drink with the umbrella right now but that’s now how this works.
The best way to get out of debt is to work hard now, so you can play hard later.
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