I’ve been a work at home mom since 2006. That’s the year I felt the traditional work world to be my own boss after being an employee at various jobs since age 13. I did venture out into the world from 2014 to 2015 as an administrative assistant. Anyway, the year is 2021 and I’m doing a lot of soul searching and getting back in line with my life’s purpose and feeling complete.
Which, yes, everybody in my house picks on me because I’m the ray of sunshine on a dark day. I am miss positivity and can see the positive in just about any situation. My family appreciates this about me, but we are a family of jokesters so it wouldn’t be normal if they didn’t tease me in some way.
One of the biggest facts about me is that I refuse to let fear control me. This isn’t to say that I never have a bad day, I simply don’t allow my life to be ruled by emotions. There are days when I just want to lay in bed and do nothing but I can’t ignore people every single day because I am a mother and I must feed and educate the kids. Thankfully, I can take breaks to lay down on the couch listen to a meditation video and relax since my kids aren’t toddlers running around needing me every second.
This year I’m practicing being on video more often and this article is more of a transcript of the YouTube video you can see below on how I got out of debt in one year.
I’m working on a goal setting workbook which is extremely exciting for me. This is why I plan to share some of my past goals with you. How I set the goals, what my mission was, how I stayed strong in moving forward to achieve those goals and some other information as I work on releasing an upcoming workbook to help YOU do the same thing! (with your own goals)
Rebuilding my Credit in One Year
I was able to figure out a way to rebuild my credit in about one year. I have actually damaged my credit 3 times and I’ll be 40 this year, so in just a few years I’ve destroyed my credit 3 times. Yes, three times! I never did learn how to manage my money, which is why I wasn’t able to sustain the goal of having good credit back in the day. While I did damage my credit this many times, if you’re ready to manage money properly then you can rebuild and maintain a better credit score using my method.
[azonpress template=”box” asin=”031652915X”]Finding my Big Enough Reason for this Goal
The first step for me in setting this goal to rebuild my credit as soon as possible was to have a big enough reason. When you have a big enough reason for the goal, you’ll always remain focused on achieving the goal. My big enough reason was that I wanted to feel stable, secure, and happy as a homeowner.
I felt owning a home would bring me the stability and security I so desired. My kids were getting older and I just felt like time was running out to set some roots and give them a forever home. I wanted the stability, security, and pride of knowing I owned a house.
[azonpress template=”widget” asin=”0999447823″]Handling Student Loan Debt
My first step in achieving this goal would be to handle my default student loan debt. These are government loans so they can’t be wiped out with bankruptcy. Nope! I had to call the collection agency they were with at the time and made a deal. I believe the deal was to pay 3-6 monthly payments on time and they’d forgive the default status, aka wipe that off my credit report.
My student loans would then go back to the original lender and I’d be in good standing, as long as I continued to pay monthly payments or was able to defer the payments properly so the loans stayed in the ‘green’ on my credit report.
Once my student loan debt was dealt with and I had a deal, I went on to call or look at the websites of all of the other debt collectors on my credit report. I used Credit Karma for most of this mission to rebuild my credit, by the way.
Credit Karma makes it easy to see your credit score, what debt you owe, and provides recommendations to help you boost your credit. All for free!
I settled on a lot of the debt I had on my credit report, and within a year I had a good enough credit score to apply for pre-qualification to buy a home! I received two pre-qualifications to buy – one was for a mobile home option and another was for a regular family house option. Both pre-qualification amounts were the same and not that high.
Didn’t Achieve FULL Goal to Buy Home
While you could look at this as a sad story in that I didn’t achieve my ultimate goal in buying a home. the pre-qualification amount was rather low and nothing on the market at the time screamed at me “buy this” or “this is a great investment” and so I didn’t go through with buying a home at the time.
Here’s the thing, buying a home was my “big enough reason” but it wasn’t my ultimate goal. The ultimate goal that made me feel so accomplished, produce, and confident in myself was rebuilding my credit in one year. I now felt like I could do anything. I knew that if I could do this in just a short year that I could do anything I set my mind to.
And this, my friends, is what goal setting is all about! Once you start achieving those little goals and get the momentum going nothing will be too far out of your reach. You’ll have all of the confidence in the world to set and achieve new goals because you will feel confident in your ability to stay strong, stay on track, and keep focus with setting daily and weekly tasks to achieve this goal.
[azonpress template=”widget” asin=”B07H4KBS4T”]How to Set Goals (Basic Steps)
To recap what I did to achieve this amazing goal of rebuilding my credit in one year:
- Associated a feeling for my big enough reason why I wanted to achieve this goal.
- Created daily, weekly, and monthly tasks (such as making calls, deals, and paying installments).
- Stayed focused on “I will rebuild my credit to a score that gets me pre-qualified to buy”.
- Never asked questions, never doubted, just stayed FOCUSED on “this will happen”.
- Take each day one at a time, don’t look too far forward, and DO NOT look back.
- Be open to adapting the ultimate end goal as things change, because changes will occur during the process.
I’ll get more into goal setting and helping you determine what you truly want for goals in life by using the SMART goals approach, learning empowering thoughts and how to use them, plus learning more about what motivates you as an individual to maintain the forward progress towards the goals. For now, I just wanted to share my story of that one time I rebuilt my credit score in one year to inspire you to start looking inward at what you truly want to accomplish in your lifetime.