Shall we take it a step further? Well, here are some signs, to help you determine in you are already in WAY over your head:
- You start going into more debt in order to pay the minimums on your credit cards, or “borrowing from Peter to pay Paul” as people usually refer to it. This one is truly serious, mostly because people do it until it is too late. I know this one family who has a mortgage payment which takes 75% of their take home pay. Their credit card debt load is up to $40K. So, what do they do to be able to afford their credit card minimum payments? take a cash advance that will pay their mortgage all the way through December.
- Next month’s bills are already piling up on top of the ones from last month.
- You know how a past due notice looks like and you get them often in the mail.
- You don’t understand where all of your bills came from, you didn’t know you had so many outstanding. Like I said previously, it is very hard to admit that we have debt problems, therefore we often turn to denial. And the worst case of denial is evidenced by the next sign:
- You have decided to stop opening mail. You have just decided you can’t deal with it anymore.
This is no joking matter of course. Being in this type of situation is not only painful emotionally but financially as well. After probably years of living beyond their means people in this type of financial problem not only have to adjust to their reality but see it impaired by the money they need to dedicate from their income to repay this debt. And then you have the case like the family mentioned above, they can’t even afford to pay back any of this debt.
