Fixing bad credit (article series) - part 1

Some things are harder to do than others. It's pretty easy to fall down when you begin to surf for the first time, for instance. It's not hard to keep from falling down walking across the street - at least, not if you're older than about three. Unfortunately, most people enter their adult lives completely unprepared from a financial standpoint and end up having to go through the process of learning to surf through the currents and massive waves in the ocean of money issues that await them. Falling down is pretty normal in that case, and unfortunately fixing bad credit is a little bit tougher than just getting wet and crawling back up on your board again.

Odd analogies aside, it's not going to be easy to fix your bad credit history. the key word there is history. It took you some time to get into the mess you're in, it's going to take you some time to get out again. Actually, fixing bad credit isn't really hard, not like scaling mount Everest hard, but it is going to take something that very few people seem to take the time to develop - discipline.

Discipline involves making some decisions about your lifestyle and money habits over a period of time. It involves patience and persistence. Wow, there are a lot of big words that sound like your grandad, I know, but there really isn't any other way around it. Part of the reason your parents and grandparents harped on those things is that they knew you would figure out the easy stuff, like falling in love, but that subjects and issues like discipline were going to need some reinforcement. So what exactly does financial discipline mean?

Well, the pursuit of discipline is the same no matter what you apply it toward. Discipline in fitness means exercising consistently and eating right every day for years at a time. You have to concentrate and practice to get good at it. And that means you're going to have to make some choices before hand, and then learn to stick with those choices for days and weeks and months and years - and decades. A lifetime in fact. But if you really want to fix your bad credit, you're going to have to change the way you think about and deal with money starting right now, and moving forward for the rest of your life. Every single day is a chance to not only fix bad credit, but gain true financial freedom from credit.

A certain amount of credit may seem necessary, but that's not entirely true either. Credit is the process by which you give away part of your cash flow over a period of time to someone else, in exchange for a lump of cash now. The only kind of credit that might be required, and only because of the way families operate these days, is house credit. Everything else is just a waste. You need to think about your cash flow in an entirely different way before you can begin to make good financial decisions.