I’m not sure why but I seem to be surrounded by people who are in debt up to their eyeballs. Many of them have been looking into debt consolidation but for the most part they’ve come up empty handed. Sean is about $2500 in debt, Karen is close to going into debt herself, even with a few thousand in the bank, that’s not going to stop the fact that bills are coming in and she’s lucky that she’s even getting a paycheck considering the company she works for is complete crap. My father was in debt for many years until he took the necessary steps in order to get himself out of it. He wound up paying credit cards off with one new low-interest card and then taking out a loan in order to cover the debt so it was completely credit card debt free. The good thing about his loan is it’s fixed interest after the first year but he’ll have it paid off before the year is even up, at least he’ll have that completely covered.

And me, while I’m not currently in debt, this doesn’t mean I’m not close to it. I live paycheck to paycheck but for the most part I don’t go beyond my means in order to get things that I don’t really need. Sure, it would be great to pull $600 out of my account right now and get myself a new monitor, graphics card and maybe even a replacement zip drive but this doesn’t mean I’m actually going to do it. I set up budgets for everything I do and at the moment, none of that is actually IN the budget. It’s mainly under my WANTS category, not my needs.