7 Smart Things To Do When You’re Struggling Financially

When you find yourself in a less than perfect financial situation, it isn’t always the best feeling. In fact, it can be incredibly overwhelming and stressful. You may spend the vast majority of your time thinking and worrying about it. Yet, it’s important to realize that this is never going to fix the situation. Instead, you have to do what you need to in order to get yourself back on track. The problem can be, however, knowing exactly where to start. When you’re worried and you feel a bit stuck, it can be confusing. But this is exactly what we’re going to help you with.

Financial security and freedom doesn’t have to be far away or impossible. It’s all about how you approach your finances. Your mindset is everything here, but so is the idea of knowing what steps you need to take to make things happen. So let’s take a look in this post at what you can do when you feel like you’re struggling financially.

To begin with, you have to make sure that you’re being very honest with yourself about where things are at. Because if you’re not honest about your situation or you’re in denial, you will find that aren’t able to get yourself out of the situation. It all starts by being quite frank and objective and seeing where you’re at and what needs work. Because then you can start taking action and doing something about it.

As you start to get more transparent, if you do have debts, you need to be honest with yourself about them and start to identify them. When you’re very clear on what you owe, where, and the full amount, you can then create an action plan for how you’re going to pay it all off.

When you know where you’re at with your debts, you might want to think about creating payment plans to get it all off. Now, you can do this in two ways. Firstly, you might want to think about starting a spreadsheet and working out what you can pay off, when, and how. But you might want to get a debt payment plan in place too. For this, it may still be possible for you to get further funding in the future. Again, just be sure before you go ahead with anything.

Another option that you can look to do here is to get some more favourable rates in place – this is particularly important when it comes to credit cards. Where you can, think about opening another card and moving your balance onto a zero percent option. But only if you’re going to be responsible with that. You could even speak to your lender and see if they can freeze your interest rates to help you pay things off too.

At the same time as looking to take on your debts, you really need to make sure that you are looking at what you’re spending too. One of the first things that can help you is to be thinking about what you can cut back on. Ultimately, the less you spend, the better. That way, you can make your earnings stretch further and look to get yourself back into a good place financially.

Another thing that you’ll find will make you feel a lot better is the idea of finding more money. It could be that you want to take part in surveys for extra cash or sell things online. You might even want to look at odd jobs that you could do here and there to make some extra cash. It’s all about being open to new options and seeing how you can improve your monthly income.

Finally, you may find that you really do need to boost your income in another way. And to do this, you’ll want to focus on getting an additional job if need be. This could work in a few ways. It could be the case that you need to get a part time job or even that you want to start a side hustle. It’s really going to depend on your financial situation and what you can do to improve it – you’ll know what’s best for you. But ultimately, any way that you can earn more will feel good.

This article was written by Sophia Anderson and originally appeared on Your Coffee Break.