The bathroom was not really shabby, but it had gone unchanged for a few years, and the tiles looked a little old-fashioned, so the easy solution was to run down to the giant DIY hypermarket and pick out a whole new bathroom, and with just a couple of signatures on a contract the new bathroom of your dreams was installed.

Unfortunately for many hundreds of thousands of people the good financial times are over and it  is a huge struggle to again achieve financial freedom, which means that you are not drowning in multiple debts that you had not noticed you had been slowly acquiring while times were good,

The best way to get back on the road to financial stability is to seek out debt solutions that can achieve your aim of removing the never-ending interest payments that seem to appear through the letterbox each and every day.

It is possible to deal with the debts yourself by contacting companies and laying yourself at their mercy. But realistically seeking professional help is the only long-term viable solution to truly cleaning up your debt situation.

A qualified debt professional will be able to counsel you as to exactly what your situation means and what are, and are not, the financial options available to you in order to clear your debt in a reasonable time period, at a rate that you can actually afford to pay.

A debt counsellor has built up long-term relationships with every high street bank, credit card company, DIY credit provider, and car finance house. They are in a position to talk to these companies on an equal and professional footing.

They can use their skills to clearly layout the financial realities of your situation and put forward proposals for payments that you can afford and the company can live with.

You may think that a company would have no reason to reduce the rate of interest payable, and cannot imagine why they would accept that you would pay back less than you actually borrowed in the first place.

But the truth is they will almost certainly do this, the reason is pretty simple, it is far better economically to have you paying back some of the money that you owe, rather than paying a debt collection agency to chase you, as well as paying all lawyers to attend court on their behalf, only to end up with possibly less than the debt counsellor is now proposing that you pay.

Once they have negotiated new terms on each and every one of your debts the total amount that you owe, the rate of interest, and the length of time that you have to pay off your debts will all have been moved to your advantage, giving you time to once again achieve the financial freedom you once took for granted.

One option that is becoming increasingly popular is peer-to-peer lending sites, such as Prosper Marketplace and Lending Club, which allow borrowers to take loans from individuals that are hoping to lend out money and get a rate of return on what they’re borrowing. These websites are often limited to those borrowers that have good credit, so if you have a credit score below 700, you’ll probably have to look elsewhere.

There are also a number of online finance companies that will make personal loans for borrowers. Each company offers their own variations of loans, with different interest rates and different lengths of loans, so make sure to find a company that offers a loan that offers terms that work for you. Some companies specialize in offering short-term emergency cash loans and others offer long term loans which range between 3 and 7 years.

There is not really a loan search engine similar to how one might find the best deal on hotels, so you will have to apply to a different companies online and take the best deal that you can get. Fortunately for credit score purposes, if you apply for a number of loans in a short period of time, it will only show as one new credit application on your credit info report, which will not damage your score in any meaningful way.

When taking out a personal loan, you should also make sure that the company you are borrowing from is reputable. Before signing up with a company, do research on the business and search for complaints about the company online. If you find a lot of their customers posting that they had a negative experience with the company, its best to search elsewhere.

There are occasions when debt, if properly managed can actually save you a lot of money if you know what strategies to apply and when to apply them. The secret to success is to look at what cash flow you have and to study your money cycle so that you can clearly identify how much money is coming in, and how much money is going out.

This will mean siting down and working out what your weekly commitments add up, and how much you have left over. For many, reading this article, you will say ‘but there’s never any money left over after I have paid all of my bills, so how do I change that’. Following is an example of how you can successfully reduce your credit card debt.

In this modern world of easily accessible credit cards, people are fast creating an epidemic of spending well beyond their means because they have access to many lines of credit. One way to reduce your credit card debt is to become very hard with yourself and simply cut up all of your credit cards except one. This will possibly be the hardest part of your new Deb Free Focus mindset.

In doing so, you will have immediately eliminated the temptation to continue spending money that you don’t have, because is it was instantaneously at your finger tips whenever you have that desire to buy something.

The next thing that you will need to do, if you are truly serious about creating a debt free focus, is to concentrate on paying as much as possible of one credit card at a time, whilst maintaining the minimum monthly balances on the rest of them. To achieve this, simply do the following:

• Add up and total the amount that you were paying into all of your credit cards.

• Look at the minimum amounts payable on each credit card

• Make this minimum payment on all cards that you cut up

• Pay the balance of monies left over into your existing credit card.

It is also advisable to wrap a little note around the credit card that you did not cut up that says ‘do I really need to use my card for this purchase’, so that if you are tempted to use that card, you will be given the opportunity to stop and think before going ahead to make that next purchase. This is a simple, but yet very powerful method that I have seen work on many occasions with those that are termed ‘credit card junkies’.

There is no quick fix solution to reducing the amount of credit card debt that you have, but with your new found debt-free focus, doing the above is a guaranteed solution if you are seriously prepared to help yourself get out of debt.

* * *

This is a guest post written by Coleen Cook, a student of MakeMoneyFromWriting.com, where she is learning how to turn freelance writing skills into consistent income.