Tools For My Financial Recovery: The Beginning
Posted on: November 6, 2008 by Matt
While working on getting myself out of debt and on the right track financially I have been figuring out what tools best suit my needs. While I have yet to get together a complete list of everything that I have used in getting my finances together I can share some of the tools that have helped me get started. When I started to get my life back in order I found that I was regularly using:
- The Telephone: I had to get in touch with all the people that I owed money to and get any problems straightened out. Communicating with creditors allowed me to make sure we were all on the same page.
- Personal Finance Software: Like Microsoft’s Money or Intuit’s Quicken. I currently use Money but have an interest in at least checking out Quicken. Either way I have found that having software that can tell me where my money is going invaluable. I can identify areas where I may be overspending and identify trends in my spending that I need to change. Then make the adjustment(s) to my lifestyle and have more money available to repay debt.
- The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness: I had a few ideas on how I was going to go about getting my loans paid down and my finances back in line but needed a few more details. An ex-girlfriend recommended Dave Ramsey to me and had brought home The Total Money Makeover Workbook to read herself. I flipped through it and found a lot of the information useful and bought the actual book. I was able to get a lot of basics under my belt by reading and practicing some of the basic ideas Dave puts forward. The price of the book was worth just learning how to budget for me as I had not learned or understood the importance of budgeting before.
- Microsoft Office: Well Microsoft Excel more than any of the other programs. I found that Excel was a much easier to use interface when putting together basic budgets than the budgets in Microsoft Money. I already had a copy of Office but if I did not I would have probably grabbed a copy of OpenOffice for free in stead.
Those are the tools that I started out my financial recovery with and I still use them all to some degree today. If you are just starting out and have no idea where to begin I would highly recommend starting of with Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness in order to pick up the basics and then start to move forward from there.
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TagsBudgeting, Dave Ramsey, Debt, Debt Reduction Filed Under: Budget, Debt, Debt Reduction, Goals, Reading, Student Loans
That is a great plan. The hardest thing I have found is to get on the phone and talk to the creditors. This has been hard for me in the sense I have been disputing Items on my credit. But now, I have to budget and try to negotiate better terms. This is a Huge learning journey
Help –
Calling was not something I was able to easily do at first. Now it is normally not an issue. It just takes a little practice. I still get a little nerve racked when having to talk to the collection agency though.