Getting Out of Debt: First Steps You Can Take Yourself
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Here's your money briefing for Tuesday, December 27th. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. Sure, everyone needs to borrow money sooner or later, but having too much debt can get in the way of reaching important financial goals or even just making ends meet. And while we'd all like to get rid of our debt, starting the process of actually clearing it away is a lot harder.
Basically, when it comes to paying down debt, you want to come to this without judgment. How would you help your best friend deal with this? And that's going to help you just be able to deal with what is and not really focus on the emotions of it.
Starting today and all this week, we'll have a special series of shows for you all about how to get yourself out of debt. We'll be getting into credit counseling, debt consolidation, and plenty more. Today, we kick off with Stephanie Genkin. She's the founder of the investment advisory firm My Financial Planner. We'll ask her how to start getting your debt under control. That's after the break.
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Lots of people have debt, a mortgage, say, or a car loan, or credit cards. And if you've got a lot of debt, you know how overwhelming it can be, how making payments can eat into your budget and loom over every spending decision, and how interest can make it seem like your balance is never going down. So how can you begin the process of clearing out past debt and start a path to financial freedom? For more on that, I'm joined by Stephanie Genkin, founder of the investment advisory firm My Financial Planner. Hey, Stephanie, thanks very much for being with us.
Oh, it's so good to be with you.
So Stephanie, you know, it's one thing to say you're going to get yourself out of debt. It's another thing to actually do it. But for a lot of people, it could be a steep uphill climb. So how should people approach this process?
I think people should be generous as they approach this process. There's a lot of shame, fear, guilt, humiliation around debt. I think you have to give yourself some grace when you start. The most important thing I would say as you approach this is you really have to know your numbers. A lot of people come to me with help getting out of debt. and then they really don't know how much debt they have, whether it's student loans or credit card debt. And I understand why you might want to avoid this, but now if you're going to get serious about it, we really need to know in each category what kind of debt there is. And more specifically, once you divide it up amongst the categories, then you want to know per loan or per credit card, what's the balance, what's the interest rate,
and the monthly minimum payment. This is the start. Once you have it all on one page, then you can start coming up with a plan. Basically, when it comes to paying down debt, you wanna come to this without judgment.
What initial mindset does Stephanie recommend for starting to tackle debt?
You really wanna come almost if it's happening to somebody else. How would you help your best friend deal with this?
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