“The single most important thing that I did was that I addressed it as a personal problem, not a ‘financial problem.’”
More from Susan Breslin, posting at TheFrisky:
Being broke teaches you a lot of hard lessons. One of them is how little upon which you can live. All those expensive things? Guess what: You won’t die without them. Those organic tomatoes? Um, no. You go to Walgreens, not Nordstrom. You learn to save, and save, and save some more, because the alternative is non-stop anxiety. In some ways, money is freedom, freedom from fear most significantly, and that was my aim. To be free. Of debt. And fear. The way I used to be.
Here’s how I did it. I stopped lying to myself. I figured out how to live on next to nothing. I socked everything else away and didn’t touch it. As soon as I had a lump sum to pay off a debt, I paid it. It took years of self-discipline and self-awareness, but I got there. One day, I was debt-free, and free of a perception of myself as irresponsible. In a way, I got to reinvent myself. Now, anything is possible.
