Since I'm rebuilding my life after a series of setbacks this summer, I wonder if anyone else has had to start over. There is a company that makes small business advances to eBay and Amazon sellers. If you have consistently good sales, then you can make the monthly automatic debit payments. But if you have a couple of months of bad sales, you still owe those high interest monthly repayments and they come out of your bank account on a scheduled date every month. I had a summer of slow sales, so you can pretty much guess what happened with my bank account (ruined) and those automatic debits. Now I have to fix my bank account, my credit and also pay some late fees to my landlord. My credit and life were fine before I took out that small business advance, now I have to work my butt off to get everything back to normal. I know a woman who was in a coma for 6 months after a car accident and had to pay off a lot of debt to fix her life and get back on an even keel. Have you ever had to start over and how did you handle it?
Ouch, those automatic debits can really get you if you're not careful. Especially in such an up and down business like amazon and ebay selling, there's really no consistency for you to know how much money you can depend on bringing in each month. I've never had to start over and rebuild, but I've also never been in a state where I haven't been in debt (paying off school loans)! And what's really worked for me is just being obsessive with budgeting and knowing exactly what I'm going to buy for the month. For grocery shopping, I'll go the online site, look for deals, and pick out what I'm going to buy and stick to my list. I have a set "fun" budget each month that I force myself not to go over. I try and avoid fast food unless absolutely necessary. It's difficult, but entirely doable. It's all about staying disciplined to your budget and what you can afford.
I have never been in a rebuilding situation but I have had to scale back. When I first started making money I was spending way too much, took me awhile to realize that just because I had it didn't mean I had to spend it. After a year or so of over the top everything I sat down and looked at my finances and realized that if I had been just a little careful I could have had a nice chunk of savings. To make up for my prior poor decisions I put myself on a very tight budget that allows for almost no extras, I really think this is the way to do it if you can, I am saving money at a decent rate and I don't notice the pinch of this budget all too often. Best of luck!
I've lived with someone who owed her bank a large amount of money. She'd also borrowed some cash from friends and had got a number of loans from credit unions. She'd tried investing all that cash in some venture which failed miserably and left her in a very bad spot. Most of the money she earned from then on went straight to repaying her debts. To get by with the little money that was left after making the payments, she had to be very frugal. Like her if you cut out every thing you can do without [including entertainment] I'm sure you'll cancel out your debt. p.s You could also try to find ways to make some extra, m-turk, crowdsource, crowdflower, etc to make a little extra cash when you're not working. Every little extra will help.
I was in a bad spot earlier this year, the reason I got out was because of family, and friends, my business in transportation went down south fast! not due to my own doings but due to employees, employees here in my country in the transport industry are not the best to work with, and I learnt that, I still do intend to go back into the transport business pretty soon, but the next time, I'll be rougher and tougher, and as an employee slips- he's fired. I would suggest to you my dear, that you do whatever you need to do, to get yourself out of debt, debt isn't good. Forget about everything and do what you think you will have to do, to get yourself out of debt. whether you are going get a job, ask for help- do whatever it takes. This is a very good threat btw, good job!
Things are definitely set up to make it more difficult to get the poor out of a tough spot.. they usually end up worse off. At least before it gets better. It's unfair. For me personally, it's how I look at it. Most people would see my family and I starting over pretty regularly LOL. But we set our own life up.. knew the consequences of our choices and prepared ourselves emotionally for all the set backs that would inevitably follow, because we strive for less.. not more. Striving for less goes against everything everyone has ever been told to do haha, so things are even less set up for people like us. We just moved quite a few hours away and it took all of our resources to do.. not to mention the domino effect it created. You can be on time with bills all the time and they'll still find a way to get you. But this is what we wanted, at least for now and we know that everything passes with some extra work to get there. of course.. there are all these systems in place to try to keep us down, but as I said.. we prepared ourselves in other ways and we just grind through harder until we're back where we were financially. Nothing else we CAN do, you know? So adding fear and sadness or negativity doesn't help an already tough situation. We save that for the day we've been beat and that hasn't happened yet
