Gathering the information necessary to compare your income with your spending can be quite eye opening for most people.
By doing this over the period of the last year you will get a better understanding of where your money has been going and why you have landed in a situation where the debt is overpowering you.
The income is easy to sort for those people on wages as that will be fixed for the year and it would be relatively easy to make a list of the fixed expenses such as your rent or mortgage your insurances and other such factors where you know the exact amount that you will be paying each month.
You can make estimates of how much you spend on your shopping for necessities and while you might make an attempt to calculate how much money you fritter away from one week to another almost everybody who does this exercise finds that they have underestimated considerably the amount of money that they have been spending.
If you are able to calculate how much money you had in the bank and how much debt you had at the beginning of the year and then add and subtract your income and your expenses as you have already calculated them you should come up with a balance of where you would expect to be now.
The next step obviously is to calculate exactly where you are now and the difference between that figure and the previous figure is the amount of money that you have frittered away without realizing that you’ve been spending it.
So where did all this money go – you might ask yourself.
Often it’s the little things that you don’t consider worthwhile recording such as the cup of coffee you have every day with the occasional take-away that you have once or twice a week. Maybe it’s the magazines that you buy each week or some other relatively small expense that adds up with all those other relatively small expenses to create a big deficit in your finances over the term of the year or so.
These are the areas where you can cut back or eliminate spending that will have a huge impact on your ability to reduce your debt and remain debt free once you have put yourself in that position.
Many little expenses add up to one big debt.