How do Your Beliefs Affect Your Ability to Achieve Financial Freedom?

The first step to reaching financial freedom is believing you deserve it and that you are capable
of achieving it. More great ideas and good intentions are forfeited because people believe
they do not deserve them and they will never succeed at meeting those goals. Changing your
beliefs and attitude about money and how to achieve debt freedom will be one of the most
important steps in getting to debt freedom.

A positive attitude about your life will make it far easier to reach your goals than having
to overcome negative thoughts you have about your life and your finances. Believing you can
be debt free is the first step to achieving debt freedom.

It is essential that your thoughts, behaviors and feelings are consistent with your goals.
This sense of harmony will help you achieve your financial goals.

Your determination and dedication will also be an important factor in achieving debt
freedom. You have to have the willingness to consistently practice the steps to produce the
results you are looking to achieve. You must regularly commit time to reaching your financial
goals.

You must be willing to take responsibilty for your finances. This is the only way you are
going to be able to keep your wealth. You must tend to it and nurture it. It is said that
wealth flows in the direction of those that know how to take care of it.

It has also been noted that if all the money in the world was evenly distributed among all
the people that live here, within 10 years it would be right back where it is now. People
who don’t take responsibility for their wealth will lose it and those that nurture it will
increase it. Start thinking about being wealthy and I will be back in a few days.

How Ready Are You for the Future?

Will you be ready for retirement? According to the U.S. Social Security Administration most of us will not be ready. They surveyed 100 Americans and here are the results.

1.5 percent are wealthy can do whatever the want whenever they want

5.5 percent are secure and can do mostly what they want with some planning

4 percent have no savings and have to keep working to support themselves

89 percent on depend friends, relatives and charities for survival

How prepared are you for an emergency and how do you compare with everyone else in the world? Below are some facts about how Americans rank among other global countries when it comes to savings.

Japanese save 21.4 percent of their income

Canadians save 14.4 percent of their income

Germans save 13.8 percent of their income

The British save 11.5 percent of their income

Americans save 2.9 percent of their income

These five steps will help you achieve debt freedom.

Assessing your financial situation. This includes recording how much you earn, spend and owe. To get to debt freedom you have to know where you are starting from.

Plans for the future. Have a vision for the future and be able to write it down, so that you can see on paper, how you want your financial situation to appear in the future. Achieving a goal depends greatly on your ability to visualize that goal. The clearer your goal, the more likely you are to achieve it.

Have specific goals. You will need to set short, medium and long range goals. Having a timeline will make it easier to see where you have been and where you are going. Short-term goals and long-term aspirations are both important when it comes to achieving debt freedom.
Simple effective tools. A simple step-by-step process for creating and tracking your wealth building is necessary.

Willingness. Once you have provided this, the rest will come fairly easily. To achieve debt freedom, you will need to take consistent action and be willing to take the steps required to reach your goal.

The will be more detail on these steps in future articles.

Money Games

In the process of doing research for this blog and for my website, I have done a lot of reading. My latest book was titled “Beat the Emotional Games That Sabotage Your Finances.” It was written by Thomas C. Manheim. Manheim talks about the fifteen Money Games people play and the reasons he believes people handle their money the way they do. I found this book to be very interesting reading.

If you are a saver and are wondering what makes you that way or if you try to hide your finances from you spouse this book will give you some incite into why you feel confortable with those habits. It can also help you changes those actions if you so desire.

Manheim says America must be one of the most money conscious countries on earth. This statement is followed by these facts:

Ninety percent of divorces are said to be related to financial problems (source: Adrian Furnham and Michael Argyle, The Psychology of Money).

One in 100 households per year will declare personal bankruptcy (The New York Times).

Nearly 70 percent of consumers live from paycheck to paycheck (The Wall Street Journal).

The average household owes more than $8,000 in credit card balances (Nataline Jenkins, et al., You Paid How Much for That?).

More than 62 percent of Americans retire on an annual incomes below $10,000 (U.S. Census Bureau).

About 55 percent of all Americans “always or sometimes worry about their money” (USA Today).

These facts may make you think twice before you go out and buy another pair of shoes or eat out at that new trendy restaurant.