• Welcome
  • How To Get Out of Debt- The Book
  • Blog
    • Debt Free Journey
    • Saving Money
    • Making Money
  • Shop
  • About
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy and Disclaimer

Wanna Be Debt Free

How to get out of debt and live your best financial life

Get Motivated, And The Rest Falls Into Place!

January 16, 2018

This post may contain affiliate links. All opinions are my own.

textgram_15161312341161734617.png

The wind is blustery, the mornings are dark and snow is on the horizon. January is in full swing, and the credit card bills are hitting your postbox. Seriously, there is no emoji for this level of depression.

I often think it’s funny that January is the month in which most of us set our expectations for the year yet it’s so difficult to even make it through the month, let alone trying to live your best life. Obviously, it’s a chance for a fresh start, but you can get feel demotivated and overwhelmed fast.

When I started paying down my debt nearly six months ago, I started small, with the idea that we wanted to be debt-free within a year. I had no idea how to make that happen. I just knew I needed a plan. Quite frankly, my partner and I were scraping by for so long and I figured that we were obviously making a lot of mistakes with our finances and I needed to learn how to fix them. That’s why it was vital to start small, because chucking a large amount of money at our debt without really addressing the issue of where our money was going, or how much we could actually afford to overpay, was always going to lead to failure.

I started in July with the idea that we would pay £100 extra than the minimum towards our debt, and start August with a budget and a plan to pay off the rest.

As a result, we hit our £100 target and started August with a clear understanding that we could cut our grocery bill and household spends in half over the following months, based on the research we did. We realised how much we were impulse spending, and cut this out over time. Allowing ourselves to focus on a plan of action that gave us an accurate picture of our finances was the key to success.

Nearly six months in and our outgoings have reduced so much that we have went from having about £200 spare each month (in theory- we didn’t actually have this in our account at the end of the month but we never knew where it went) to more than £1,000. Most of this has been down to cutting down gradually on what we are spending, which takes time.

So if you need motivation to achieve your 2018 debt-freedom resolution, here’s what I suggest:

  1. Start small; for today, set an achievable target having a ‘No Spend Day’ (i.e. a day where you don’t spend unnecessarily)
  2. Allow yourself to build up to bigger targets, so for example, until the end of this month, you could set yourself the goal that you won’t add to your debt and you will start February with a brand new budget (my post that helps you draw up your budget is found here). This is how I started and I am halfway there- it works!
  3. Remember that you are only starting out. If your goal was to run a marathon, you’d give yourself plenty of time to train. Learning how to budget effectively takes time, and going from a debt mindframe to a debt-free mindframe has taken me months
  4. Let go of any negativity. If you’ve started the year with good intentions and got demotivated, forget it and move on. I’ve messed up a few times on my journey but if I started to get down about it, it would be so much harder to get back on the wagon. We are human, after all.

A year from now, you will wish you started today. 

Good luck everyone x

Share this
  • Share on Facebook
  • Tweet on Twitter

2 CommentsFiled Under: Debt Free Journey

Comments

  1. Fille De Finance says

    January 17, 2018 at 2:38 am

    Starting small- and keeping goals small is so important. So often people set a goal like “pay off 30,000 of my loans in the next two years!” Well, how do you plan on getting there? Small easy steps are totally the way to go! Congrats on your saving!

    Reply
    • WannaBeDebtFree says

      January 17, 2018 at 6:05 am

      Thank you! I totally agree, starting small is the way to go!

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Hi, I’m Grainne, the face behind WannaBe DebtFree. Click my pic to learn how I paid off £16,000 of debt in one year.

Hi, I’m Grainne, the face behind WannaBe DebtFree. Click my pic to learn how I paid off £16,000 of debt in one year.

Subscribe to the WannaBe DebtFree newsletter and get a FREE downloadable Debt Payoff Snowball Tracker

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from WannaBe DebtFree:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Digital Budget for use w/ Google Sheets

Digital Budget for use w/ Google Sheets

Available

£2.49 GBP

Copyright © 2023 Wanna Be Debt Free · Privacy Policy