Step 1 – Accept Your Situation
The starting point for financial recovery is to stop wallowing in your misery and accept reality. Yes, it’s a bummer. Yes, you’re likely the victim of somebody else’s wrongdoing. Yes, it’s devastating.
Most important of all – none of that matters now. What’s done is done and there is no turning back. Resisting what’s already a fact is futile, so don’t waste your energy – accept reality.
Living in the past only makes forward progress more difficult. Instead, accept the setback, let go of it, and commit to forward movement. Not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s the best way to help yourself. As long as you waste your energy wallowing in your misery, you’ll have that much less energy to dedicate to solving the very real challenges you face to move forward in life.
The best defense is a good offense, so get out of defensive mode and get started on the road to recovery with a clear offensive strategy.
Step 2 – Take Inventory
The second step to financial recovery is to take inventory of your current situation. You must know what resources you have, and what liabilities you face, when developing your plan to come back from catastrophe.
You have to know where you’re at now before you can develop a realistic plan to get where you want to go in the future.
It’s no different than using a road map to plot your path to a destination. In order to plan the route to reach your goal, you must first locate where you are now on the map.
It’s the same thing financially – you must define your starting point based on what is true today.
Ask yourself the following questions to assess your situation:
- What are your remaining assets?
- How much money do you owe?
- How much income do you bring in each month?
- How much do you spend?
- What is your credit score?
- Are they any long term implications to the financial disaster (alimony, health issues, I.R.S. liens) that must be included in your recovery plan?
Step 3: Define Your Goal
The third step in your financial recovery plan is to define your objective or goal. You must determine where you want to go financially. Staying with our road-map analogy, this step is akin to locating your end destination on the map.
Once you know where you are (step 2), and you know the end destination (step 3), it’s simply a matter of plotting the course to get there (step 4).
Setting your end destination is the same thing as setting a goal. The “S.M.A.R.T.” goal setting system provides helpful guidelines:
- Specific: There must be a clear and definable end result. For example, “I want to make more money” is too vague and general, but, “I want to have $10,000 per month residual income after taxes by January 5th, 2017″ is specific and points you in a clear direction.
- Measurable: You must have some way to measure your progress toward the goal. In the example above, the measurement is dollars of residual income per month. I also encourage you to add interim goals along the way to break big goals into more realistic chunks. For example, how much residual income should you have one year from now? Three years? Five years?
- Attainable: There’s a fine balance between setting a goal that stretches your ability while still remaining within reach. If you set a goal that’s too easy, then you’re not challenging yourself. If you make it too hard, then you’re setting yourself up for failure. A properly designed goal achieves that razor-edge balance that stretches your comfort zone without being out of reach.
- Realistic: If you’re deep in credit card debt and filing for bankruptcy, it probably isn’t realistic to set a goal of becoming a millionaire in 12 months. Enough said?
- Timely: A goal without a deadline is just wishful thinking. You may want $10,000 per month residual income, but unless you include a date for this to occur by, it doesn’t qualify as a smart goal. It’s just wishful thinking. Give yourself a deadline.
YOU need to pick up yourself and move on in life. Life does not wait for anyone.
We are ready to assist you in starting over because we know what it means to fail and succeed again. CLICK HERE to start
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