Padriag
Posts: 2633
Joined: 3/30/2005
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quote:
ORIGINAL: bandit25
Wow...what a success story. Good for you.
Thank you. I will say this, I haven't done anything that I don't think anyone else couldn't do if they put their mind to it. For all the talk of bad economies and blaming the government and corporations, there is still so much opportunity in the US. The trick is adapting, times change and that is never going to change! The ones that survive and thrive are the ones who learn to adapt to those changes and keep going.
For me it was partly about hard work. There's no getting around that, if you want to success in your life you are going to have to work hard. I started a new business this year and I've had to do the work of three people because its still a small business and there wasn't the budget to hire the extra labor. That's changing I'm happy to say, but for awhile there I was working a lot of long hours.
Hard work isn't enough though. There was a saying I was raised with, "Work smarter, not harder." Which isn't an excuse not to work hard, but sometimes hard work either isn't enough or isn't necessary. You have to be smart about that. You have to think about what you are doing, how you earn your money, how you spend it and find what's most effective. Don't just work hard, work effectively.
And you have to have a plan to get you where you are going. Lots of people set goals for themselves, they're at point A and they want to get to point Z. What they don't do is plan how to get to all those other points in between that are the necessary steps to go from A to Z. I made the comeback I have because I had a plan, I thought not just about what I wanted, but exactly how I was going to get there.
Oh and a bit of advice passed on to me about building your credit.
Do not cancel those credit cards, pay them off and stick them in your sock drawer. Cancelling them actually dings your credit a bit. This was shared with me by a loan officer at one of the banks I do business with.
One of the best ways to build your credit is by simply building up credit history. Apparenlty the major factor in your credit score is having made regular payments on your accounts without having let things go overdue. So first of all, always pay at least the minimum required. Second, if you have a few things that you don't have to pay off, don't, make the monthly payments. For example, I bought a laptop recently and was going to just pay it off this month. A credit councelor advised me not to but instead to keep making the monthly payments because each payment goes on my credit report and builds more history. I have a couple such items (none of them are large balances so I'm not paying too much in interest) that I am doing this with for no other reason than the history it builds.
Pay your monthly utilities bills with a credit card, then pay the credit card off. It used to be years ago that paying your monthly utilities and stuff helped build your credit. These days it rarely gets reported. So get a credit card, if you want have one card you use just for that purpose, and pay your bills with that, then pay it off at the end of the month. In effect, you're getting your getting those monthly payments reported via a credit card and that too helps build more credit history.
And I agree with MsIncognito, credit cards are not evil. They're just a tool, its how you use it that is good or bad. Like her, I don't spend money I don't have. I don't carry a balance forward on my credit cards. I have two small accounts that I have deliberately left open for the reason I give above. I realize there are some who already have balances they can't pay off, I would stress that you at least make the minimum payments... as long as you do that it doesn't ding your credit score. Then get on the phone with the credit card companies and see if one of them will work with you about transfering some balances at a low interest rate. Many of them will compete with each other to get those balances and you can sometimes get a good deal on the interest rate., and get a much lower rate than what you are paying now (most charge between 16% and 20%, but if you haggle with them I've gotten as low as 6.5% APR at a fixed rate for the life of the balance transferred, thats competitive with a secured bank loan!). And of course, get your spending under control!
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Padriag
A stern discipline pervades all nature, which is a little cruel so that it may be very kind - Edmund Spencer
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RE: broke in the lifestyle? - 
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