So the postman makes his usual rounds, delivers your morning mail and amongst the pile you see an ominous letter from the bank or one of your creditors. We’ve all done it before, where you pick up the mail and think “I can’t deal with this right now”, or “I’ll look at it later”, or “whatever, they’ll get it when they get it, can’t pay with chocolate buttons…what am I supposed to do!?”
It’s easy to ignore a letter or a phone call. The problem is that dealing with debt like this becomes habitual because a letter itself is not cause for alarm, or a true measure of the consequence of ignorance. Once you have ignored one letter, it becomes easy to ignore them again and again. But while this ignorance - even if out of necessity - is easy, the impact on our credit and on our path out of debt can be severe. So why exactly do we do it? Why are we so predisposed to take the hard way out of debt?
Denial, Pride and Fear
This is the killer three, each one in their own right capable of guiding you down the hard path out of debt. Denial generally goes hand in hand with low visibility of debt. Where you chose to have a blasé attitude to your finances, not really paying much attention to what you are spending it is easy to ignore escalating debt until it is too late. When you receive a letter or a call, it is dismissed with the knowledge that it will be paid off on your next payday, but with little thought into how that then affects next month’s budget. This lack of acknowledgement of the situation eventually turns to denial when the situation exceeds its tipping point, and only serves to push you down a difficult path.
Pride on the other hand, is a beast all of its own. Manifested through ego, it can reveal itself as denial or arrogance, or as an effort to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ each equally as damaging. In either case, ego driven pride can make you feel above debt, ignorant towards it, that it will simply take care of itself, or someone else will take care of it and you don’t need to worry about such a silly thing as money. They’ll get it when they get it right?
Fear can work as a positive thing or negative, depending on what actions it stimulates in the debtor. Where fear stimulates action, generates alarm and encourages you to focus on taking care of the situation, to become aware of it and make it visible, then this is a great asset. But when fear pushes us the other way, makes us clam up, burry our heads in the sand or causes panic and freezes us from taking action, then this can take us down the hard path, stalling action while the situation deepens.
How these factors affect us depends greatly on our individual instincts and our personality types. So with these factors appearing as negative as they do, why would we possibly choose this way out of debt over the easy way?
The Easier Way Looks Like The Hard Way
To address debt the easy way, to reverse the trend and to dig yourself out, you generally have to change your lifestyle. The bigger the debt, the bigger the change and as such, the easy way out very often on the surface looks like the hard way. To continue as usual requires no effort, but to change your lifestyle upsets the status quo, it requires effort, thought, adjustment and usually limitations and on the surface this is not appealing. You've undoubtedly gotten used to the lifestyle you lead, but if it was sustainable it wouldn’t be generating debt, and that is why it will ultimately lead to a more difficult way out of debt if you don’t change your ways.
Facing it head on, courage and visibility
In truth, there really is no easy way out of debt. The choice echoes the red pill/blue pill dilemma. To ignore it only increases the problem and to act on it requires great lifestyle change. But the latter certainly leads you down a better and ‘easier’ path to recovery. If you can bring yourself to accept that you have to take action, face the debt head on with courage, and take steps to keep a good deal of visibility on your finances in and out, then you can not only improve your financial situation but create a more stable lifestyle, manageable and sustainable with your current economic attainability. This takes courage, which again is down really to our instincts and our personality traits, the ‘fight or flight’ mechanism that is built into us all.
So while at least to a degree, or route down the ‘hard’ way could be predetermined by our personality traits and our instincts, we do all ultimately have a choice. The sooner you chose to take action, to accept your situation and act on it, the easier your path out of debt will be.
