Much of the attention in our society is on repairing damage of one sort of another. Maybe it’s losing weight, stopping smoking, getting into shape, or even getting out of debt. Whatever the case, the sad fact is that most initiatives of this sort just simply don’t work out the way they’re supposed to.
If you’ve ever wondered why, you needn’t go further than looking at how such systems and products are marketed: “lose weight in two weeks”, “stop smoking in just three days”, and “get out of debt in 30 days”. It’s ridiculous, but our society is not so much obsessed with improvement, but in improvement that is fast and easy.
The real problem, of course, is that fast and easy improvements rarely work. Think about the weight loss example for a moment to understand how this applies to the matter of getting out of debt. No one is born obese. It requires a lifetime’s commitment to get that way. It requires systematically eating more calories than you burn, over and over again, for years. It requires systematically choosing to avoid exercise, time and time again, for extended periods of time.
Likewise, when you decide to become healthy again, you face a certain problem. Your body has become conditioned to being overweight and it will tend towards maintaining that current weight. Losing weight for you will be harder than it will be for someone who only has a marginal weight problem.
Change won’t happen overnight. Rather, it will require just as much commitment as becoming overweight did. It will require you to systematically choose, over and over again, to eat right and to exercise. If you do, you will eventually see improvement, and if you don’t, you will not. It’s as simple as that.
This is exactly how it is too for debt. Most people didn’t get thousands of dollars into debt overnight. It required a long term commitment to bad spending habits and irresponsible decisions regarding the repaying of debts. And just like your body’s tendency to hold on to the weight it gains, your mind will tend to hang on to your bad spending and saving habits, such that it becomes easy to create more debt even as you get rid of that which you already had. The only way to get out of debt is to commit yourself to the long haul.
Think about it this way. Even if something amazing happened and you were to win the lottery or come into an unforeseen windfall of millions of dollars, if your habits don’t change, you would just find yourself in debt all over again. The irresponsible spender can burn through one million just as easy as he or she can burn through a thousand. With this in mind, you can begin to understand that it’s not just disheartening, it’s also foolish to wish for a quick solution to your debt problems; they just don’t exist!
In the end, the truth is evident. Getting out of debt and staying out of debt requires a long term commitment and for a change to come from within.
Don’t look for it anywhere else.
Tags: debt consolidation, get out of debt, debt free
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