Do you have the energy to fight debt? Part 1

When I read personal finance books I generally feel like the life is being sucked out of me. I am hit by a wave of tiredness. Part of the reason why has to do with the fact that most Personal Finance books are dull. They are full of facts and figures and they can be well written but they make what is already an unappealing subject even more unappealing. The thing is I actually like personal finance and I enjoy reading about new ideas in relation to personal finance. But if I am honest most of these books put me to sleep.

If these books put me to sleep I can only imagine what they are doing to people with no interest in personal finance. People in debt may have been recommended to buy a certain book as a quick solution to their debt problems. However it is likely that some of them will become even more frustrated and depressed if they are faced with a book that is boring.

It’s not just the personal finance books that cause people to go into a trance. The whole field of personal finance is almost like a dirty word to most people. There seems to be an inbuilt resistance to tackling financial problems – particularly debt problems. Most people just don’t want to know, sure they’d like to have all their financial problems solved but when push comes to shove they are not really bothered.

You come home after a long hard day at work, you’re tired and hungry. The last thing you want to do is sit down and go through the process of creating a budget or sorting your bills. I know I’ve been there. In fact it can get even worse because when you know that you should be doing work on your personal finances you start to feel guilty. But no matter how guilty you feel you still can’t overcome the inertia that has you sitting in front of the TV all night.

The weekends aren’t much better. You wake up on Saturday morning full of confidence. You assure yourself that this weekend you will tackle your finances. By noon on Saturday you still haven’t done anything but you are still confident – there’s plenty of weekend left. By six on Saturday you decide to enjoy your evening and you will sort your finances tomorrow. Sunday is not much better. It passes by so fast that you don’t even have time to think. Its eight o’clock before you realize that you forgot to look at your finances. Ok you say to yourself I’ll do it one night during the week. Unfortunately that one night during the week never happens. Your finances remain the same.

Now the scenario above is a bit general but it outlines nicely the way most of us manage to push looking at our finances as far away as possible. I’ve always had a problem with looking at my finances. Ironic I know but true. I often wondered why this was. The reason I came up with is that I was tired and the thoughts of looking at my finances made me even more tired. For me looking at my finances was too much like work.

Do you feel the same? Do you feel that looking at your finances is too much like hard work? Well you’re right it is like work and it’s certainly not easy. So how do you overcome that inertia?

 Clear the mental clutter. 

Before you can tackle your finances you need to tackle the mental clutter. The feelings of tiredness and dread come primarily from the one hundred and one thoughts going through your mind at any one time.

The simplest way to tackle this mental clutter is to write a list. On this list write down all your thoughts – however random. In fact the more random the better. You will feel immense relief once you get these thoughts down on paper. You are in effect verbalizing your problems, hopes, fears, dreams and worries. This allows you to then think about your thoughts in a more structured and logically fashion. Do this for a week – everyday after you get home from work. You will be surprised at difference it will make. After the week is up you will probably notice a pattern to your thoughts. This pattern should then be used as the basis for an action list.

I know the dreaded ‘A’ word – action. But trust me you’ll enjoy this. Ok so you have your list of thoughts and you have highlighted the recurring thoughts. Now what I want you to do is to write down three fun and enjoyable actions that you can take that will help you solve your problems or resolve a particular situation that you are thinking about. For example if you are stressed at work – you could invite a close friend at work for a coffee or a beer and you could have a good rant about the situation. You could take your companies logo and put it on a dart board and fire darts at it for an hour or so. The list is endless but the emphasis has to be on fun fun fun. You have to take actions that will allow you to let off steam and enjoy yourself.

So what has this go to do with my debt and personal finance? Well the aim is to tackle the problem of your inaction in a roundabout way. For most people the thoughts of diving head first into their financial problems can be too much. It was financial neglect that caused the problem in the first place and this is not going to be solved overnight. The goal here is to clear your mental clutter and get the cogs of action turning in your brain. You’re more likely to take action if it seems appealing so the key here is to make it appealing.

I mentioned it in previous articles but one technique that I find really useful is NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming. A bit like brain surgery without the actually surgery. Here is a link to an ebook that comes highly recommended. Success with NLP

In Part 2 of this article I discuss the impact of environment and how it can slow you down mentally and impeded your progress.