Something that I’ve been doing along with tracking my
debt and debt reduction progress, is tracking my net worth. What prompted me to do it in the first place
was this desire to prove that my huge amount of debt had actually bought me
something. What I ended up proving to
myself was that I had wasted a ton of money on nothing. I’m young in my career so I don’t have much
set aside in retirement and my personal savings was at $0. I owe as much on my car as it is worth and my
personal items don’t amount to much when compared to my huge debt. My net worth was 10’s of thousands of dollars
in the negative. I was worthless….
actually I was worse than worthless.
When I started this process I was so ashamed of where I
was that I never shared with any friends or family my financial situation. That included not telling anyone that I had
started a real plan of debt pay-off and a blog to record my progress. The biggest reason I didn’t want to share
this information was not because I was worried they would judge me based on the
amount of debt I had racked up, it was because I was worried what they would
think if I completely failed to keep whittling away at my debt… I have a
history of jumping gung-ho into a project, be it tangible or self-improvement and
then giving up when things get tough or just losing interest altogether when
something new comes along.
But given that I have been sticking to this goal and
gaining steam every step of the way, I decided it was time to start sharing my
efforts with those closest to me. It
felt great to admit to people that I had been struggling and was not proud of
my past debt-ing ways but was overcoming my debt and really accomplishing
something. I didn’t really give too much
detail about the actual numbers and the only person I gave the blog address to
was my middle sister who is similarly trying to dig her way out of debt but it
still felt great to get it out there.
When I was talking to my mom about it I told her that I
was looking forward to the day that my net worth would break even, that I would
officially be worth nothing financially speaking and we got a good laugh at
that. She, of course, assured me that I
would never be “worthless” but it was just so freeing to be able to talk openly
about my debt problems and my attempt to overcome the debt with someone so
close to me. And now that I’m out in the
open to my friends and family it gives me the added push to stay on track!
I can relate, and I am adding you to my blogroll. I have similarly been reluctant to document my efforts to raise money, but I went ahead and decided to post them publicly, and it makes me nervous that I might fail.
ReplyDeleteThanks for adding me! Posting about this very personal matter, even though anonymously and even though I haven't shared specifics with my loved ones, has really helped keep me on track and more honest about my actions. And I think a little bit of nervousness about failing can be a good motivator!
ReplyDeleteThats fantastic. I was a bit embarrassed at first to be so open about how in debt we were, but being open about it has made us accountable..and it saves us from explaining why we bring a flask to the bar :)
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