I’m with you lets move on and fix the problems!

However, this doesn’t mean you need to beat yourself up over it.

Understanding a mistake, and punishing yourself for a mistake, are not the same thing at all.

My family is working hard to put its financial house in order. For me it started two years ago when I started saying a little affirmation ten times every morning:

I will be financially well-off within four years.

At the time I had NO idea how that could be possible, but I decided to see what the power of positive thinking might bring. We were falling farther and farther behind, so the idea of being anything close to “well-off” seemed more than just unlikely.

I stuck with it. Just a few repetitions every day. No money rained down from the heavens. No forgotten rich uncle passed away. However, we did finally start a budget, reduced our conspicuous consumption to a level we could live with, and began aggressively paying down debt — and we still had enough left over for a joint fortieth birthday present for my wife and I of a trip to London.

I have two years left to go — and what do you know! — we should have our consumer debt eliminated in exactly that time.

Oh — I did eventually rework my affirmation to spread it to more parts of my life. Now it’s simply:

I will be happy, healthy, wealthy and wise.

pf101

It’s a matter of determining what’s your financial “latte factor” (to use David Bach’s analogy). Mine wasn’t going out for dinner too much in a week, or buying $5 lattes every day, but rather just having access to that line of credit. A $5 swipe here, a $10 swipe there, and suddenly I’ve used up the whole $10K!

So now that I’ve been able to talk my bank into a slightly lower interest rate, I’m slowly chipping away at it, and once it’s done, it’s going bye-bye!

Owning up to what has put me into debt is a liberating experience, because then it allows me to better plan my attack, instead of whining and saying “whoa is me”.

Because you’ve discovered the secret to financial “luck” (hard work, advanced planning, living within your means) you are over $13,000 better off than when you started the blog, while others just look up at you from rock bottom and say “gee, you’re so lucky…” as if a sack of money fell off a truck or something. If you haven’t heard that yet, you will eventually.

Last time someone said it to me was when a payroll mistake resulted in a check for about $50 instead of my normal salary. I let the payroll clerk know about it and she rushed over apologizing and offering to cut me a check immediately. I told her “Please don’t bother, just make sure the payroll provider adds it to the next paycheck.” It was easier to have it direct-deposited in two weeks than go to the bank and deposit a manual check.

A group of co-workers somehow decided that because I was able to cover one paycheck – a whopping TWO WEEKS of living expenses – that I must be independently wealthy or paid much more than they are (I am not). “Must be nice not to need a paycheck” they grumbled on their way to their mortgaged luxury cars to go out to lunch like they do every day.

“Yeah,” I thought, “it is nice” as I pulled out my brown bag lunch made at my easily-affordable anti-mcmansion house a three mile drive from work in my six year old paid-off economy car (but I live on a direct bus route just in case). “I sure am ‘lucky’.”

Looking back, I can only blame myself for my debt. Its too easy to put it on my parents for not teaching me about money, but then again they didn’t have any either.