Journal you way out of debt
Keeping a private journal of your thoughts and actions to help you focus on a task
Written by the Debt Freedom team 3 min read
What we didn't expect was the level of emotional support it gave me, just writing it
Is journalling the answer to all your prayers? Well maybe. It would be worth a go!
A free and easily accessible tool to help focus and calm the mind. If you are using an Apple product you could choose their built in journalling software, a paper diary or note book or notepad. The choice is all yours.
What is journalling?
Writing in a journal or diary is just a way of taking a little bit of time to focus on how your day has gone. A time to reflect on the good and the bad.
We are all different but we all in many ways the same. Often we are reactive in the moment, making decisions that we may later regret. Some decisions are more permanent or long lasting than others. So if you are looking at that tattoo or your bank balance and wondering how you go there, your journal may be a good place to go back to.
How could journaling help me get out of debt or built an emergency fund?
Just the action of spending time in mindful thought about a problem or goal can be enough to spark your creativity, your determination and drive. If you are in debt, it has probably taken you a while to get where you are, so it makes sense it is going to take time to get out. If you write a private journal for yourself - you may find that each day it sparks new ideas.
A practical example
We have been updating a daily blog post for our 31 days without spending challenge. When we started it, we didn't really know if it would be useful.
- What we didn't expect was the level of emotional support it gave me, just writing it. It felt like just putting the words down made the issue more manageable. It reminded me to think about the issues and fix it rather than ignore it and hope it would improve on.its own. Perhaps because it is being written over multiple days, it allows me to rest and sleep between decisions.
Money isn't maths, its emotional
If money was just a formula to calculate Income - outgoings = savings, then we could all just earn more than we spend and save for the future - building our wealth over time. No bumps, no hiccups just a smooth, gradual increase in wealth over time.
- However, money is not that simple. It is emotional, embarrassing, it's tied into our ego, our feeling of self-worth and our place in society. If we are in debt we may feel that we have failed in life, trapped or that we have been mislead or cheated. All these feeling and more, make money much harder than just maths.
So journalling that can help to quieten the emotional aspect of money and help to focus your thoughts could be just one additional tool that you can implement in your life, even temporarily to help you get debt free.