I used all this extra time to reflect and assess my life goals. I made a mental plan on how I'd climb out of my situation and set goals for myself.
In January this year I attended a goal setting session run by a friend of mine. He does this for himself once a year and decided to extend the invite to a bunch of friends and we all met up to do it together.
From the lessons I'd learnt about myself and from looking at my situation I realized, with everything I had on my plate that earning more money was inconceivable. My spare time outside of work was taken up spending quality time with my son or dealing with legal issues and I also had a new partner.
I cut myself some slack on pressuring myself to earn extra money. My answer was not just to earn extra money but to avoid spending money.
During these sessions I set myself some financial goals that were pretty epic. These goals demanded some severe culling of some ‘unnecessary' personal expenses.
I found the little things accumulated and made a big impact!
I planned for 12 weeks of little to no life in order to pay down things like credit cards. These credit cards were charging a fortune in interest. Not having to pay that interest would be a help in itself.
I went hard out on the no life aspect. To be honest I went a bit too hard out. But, I achieved my goal, in just 6 weeks. I felt so proud of myself. Achieving that was better than any quick fix of buying a PlayStation 4 or a new pair of shoes (if that's your vice)!
Over the course of the year I've loosened the belt, to maintain my sanity, and tightened it back up again more than a few times. This was both intentional and unintentional at times.
Life has thrown me curve balls since paying those down. Like I said before it's a real pain to have deal with situations that put you back to square one. But I held onto the fact that I can do it. I can streamline my life and live on a shoe-string budget to get out of my situation.
