“Financial Awakening, Part III: Debt = Slavery”

When I decided to start a personal blog about my journey to be debt free, I spent a lot of time coming up with the title, Reigning Money.  I started by looking up the word debt in the thesaurus, and found words like commitment, deficit, duty, responsibility.  Since those words just made me feel more miserable about my situation, I began thinking about what being out of debt would mean for me.  I came up with the word freedom.

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Being debt free will grant me more control over my life by giving me the freedom to spend my money on the things I want instead of paying it off to debt collectors.  So, I looked up freedom in the thesaurus.  It said words like free, liberty, opportunity, play, rein.  Yes!  That’s what I want when I’m out of debt.  At the bottom of the entry, after all the synonyms, it listed antonyms.  Here were words like captivity, confinement, imprisonment, limitation, and SLAVERY.

Whoa!  That’s what this debt was doing to me.  I was being held captive.  I was a slave to credit card companies.  I was limiting the choices available to me on what to do with MY money.  It hurt when I realized how much this debt was truly holding me back from accomplishing my dreams in life.

I felt ashamed for the situation I had gotten myself into.  There was no one to blame but myself.  It wasn’t unemployment or a medical crisis that had gotten me in this predicament, but rather it was my own poor decisions and wasteful spending that had.

Debt=Slavery.  This equation is a daily reminder of my current financial situation and motivates me to break free.

In what way are you enslaved by your debt?  What will it mean to you to be free?

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