http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct3OsJacTSs

Confidence is faith in your own ability… and confidence can determine whether or not you will succeed in achieving your goal.

One of the major stumbling blocks to achieving your goal, living your dream, overcoming debt settlement and debt consolidation, or doing anything you want to do in your life… is a lack of confidence!

When people have confidence, they consistently take action and make necessary changes, they get results and achieve their goals.

When people lack confidence, however, they get stuck and they remain stuck. They may have the same ability and skills as a person with confidence, but because they lack confidence they don’t easily take action towards their goals.

Having confidence is essential to achieving your goals and living your dreams.

You may have the knowledge and skills to do something, you may have all your goals and action steps written out, you may have everything in place to go ahead and achieve your goal… live your dream… start doing the things that you want to do in your life.

You may have everything right ready to put into action… but without confidence, without confidence in your ability to do this and to achieve it… you won’t get very far.

People who lack confidence typically:

– are very shy

– have difficulties relating to other people

– have difficulties in communicating with people they don’t know very well

– rely on alcohol to give them “dutch courage” to do something

– don’t get very far in their career

– don’t take many risks

– settle for the sameness rather than different experiences

I don’t know about you, but I have a problem with my confidence. I know I lack confidence in some areas of my life… and it is in these areas I’m not achieving the kind of results I would like. I’m a whole lot better than I used to be when I was younger… but I know I have quite a way to go yet before I have a strong confidence in me.

Lacking confidence now in your life, doesn’t mean that you will always lack confidence. Your confidence is something you can work on. You can learn techniques that will not only develop your confidence but strengthen it… and when your confidence is strengthened, you begin to achieve more in your life. You can confidently go for opportunities that come your way… and not only go for them, but enjoy them and achieve them.

Tell me if this brings back memories and I’m sure most freshman orientations are pretty much alike across our country. You have class advisors available to you help with your degree plan, then you have your sororities soliciting their clubs, then you have the busiest section of the arena, the “get your credit card here.”

At 18 yrs old, the thought of have buying power at my fingertips and then making a small $20 payment month sounded like a winner to me. Little did I know that a $2000 credit card debt would take almost 15 years to payoff. YES, it’s true. You take a $2000 credit card debt at let’s say 21% interest rate give or take, making a minimum payment of $20 a month, it will take you more or less 15 yrs to payoff. This was no longer a winner for me, and it all started at 18 yrs old at my freshman orientation.

Through personal research I’ve done, I’ve read different articles stating that the credit card companies’ target college students. Some of the reasons stated are, college is expensive to begin with, and with parents exhausting all their funds just paying for tuition, living expenses, and books, parents are pretty much broke, and cannot provide additional funds for a student life. So this is where a credit card comes into play.

This is where at 18 yrs old we do not understand that we have to pay our debt back on time every month without fail. Unfortunately, when we cannot meet these obligations, this is where our credit begins to suffer. This brings me to my second reason why credit card companies’ target college students.

I’m a parent of three, and as a parent I want to give my kids the best opportunity in life that they can have, and as a mature adult we understand that we have to have good established credit to make major purchases like your home. And because of this reason alone credit companies take a big risk on college students and hope that all parents in America love their children enough that they are not going to let bad credit ruin their child’s future.

A good example, I once attended a seminar where collection manager said he had great success in collecting credit debt from students by just calling their parents. I’m not an expert in law, so I don’t know if this method is correct, but imagine receiving a call from a credit card company saying your child’s credit might be ruined if his credit card doesn’t get paid? I don’t know about the rest of America, but I’m going to do what I can to save it, and then of course followed by a long lecture to our child.

Now we begin to see a little of how important it is to educate our kids about credit, debt, and how important it is to them in the future. From here I would like to talk a little about thinking outside the box, but still with the same concept of giving our children the best opportunity in life that they can have. I have decided to do something different for my kids. I have started a different approach that will benefit my kids in the years to come. I have decided to break the chain of your traditional saving for college tuition.

Instead I have started to think like an entrepreneur and look for opportunities around me every day. Now my kids are still going to go to college, the only difference is I will have instilled in them an entrepreneur mindset that they will not need a credit card to get them around. Hopefully I can inspire others to do the same.

• Figure out how much you can pay on each debt and when you can realistically complete paying back the loan. An example of this would be if you pay $40,000 for your car at the end of 15 years. If you have any questions on this step, it is best that you ask a financial adviser.
• As you are going over and reviewing all of your available options, always have your final numbers in mind. You should be asking yourself questions like how long will it take you to pay off your new loan and will it cost you more money over the long run? If any of your answers are not to your liking then you may be forced with just sticking it out with your existing loans, even if payments are a little higher.
• Expertly knowing and navigating the in’s and out’s of various loan programs requires a lot of heavy duty number crunching. If you don’t think you are up to the task, again hire the help of a financial adviser.

You can save paying on the interest by making higher monthly payments than the minimum on a regular basis than you need to. This will also cuts down the number of years you will be paying on the loan significantly.

This easy way to rid your life of financial burden is called debt consolidation. Simply put, debt consolidation and debt settlement is a method of having two or more financial obligations such as school loans and a mortgage and then combining them into one large debt. I did this by attending a few debt counseling classes.

More and more people are choosing debt consolidation as an easier way of handling multiple credit card debts through combining several credit card balances into one consolidated account. You now have an easy-to-manage budget all in one place.

You’re ready to get your life in order again…