New Year, New You! It’s a cliche really. Every year we all make those ridiculous new year’s resolutions. I’m going to lose weight, I’m going to get in shape, I’m going to eat better, I’m going back to school. We all want to better ourselves in the new year because we view it as a fresh start, an opportunity to change our lives for the better. Most of us don’t change our habits unfortunately and because of that we just fall back into the same old routine that we’ve lived in for the better part of our lives. We don’t go back to school, we join the gym but we stop going after three weeks, we go out and buy the health food and it ends up rotting in our fridge. We are, unfortunately, creatures of habit. But we don’t have to be.
189,000,000. That’s a large number. That’s more than half of the United States. That’s also the number of people who have a credit card in the United States. The average person carries more than $8,000 in credit card debt alone and as a whole, consumers in the U.S. have more than 13 TRILLION dollars of consumer debt. While the majority of that debt is tied up in our homes via mortgages, credit card debt and auto loans total nearly 3 Trillion dollars. That’s almost enough to run the entire government of the United States of America for a year. With all that debt floating around out there, it’s no wonder people find themselves in trouble and find their nest eggs shrinking and their ability to fund even basic life expenses severely limited.
New Year, New You can apply to a lot of things in your life. One thing that people often put off is a change in their financial habits. Money is hard and like anything that’s hard, most people just want to keep the status quo. We go along, making our minimum payments to keep people off our backs. By doing that though, we never really get ahead. We keep trudging along with the heavy weight of debt tied around our necks. Keeping us up at night, keeping us stressed, keeping us unhealthy and keeping us from bettering ourselves.
We want to help. The attorneys at Harmon and Gorove have decades of experience using the bankruptcy laws to help people clean up their finances and get their lives back on track. If you really are all about the New Year, New You, start with your wallet. It’s a step in the right direction and it isn’t nearly as painful as that stairmaster at the gym.