Each of us lives only now, in this brief instant. The rest has been lived already. So make the most thoughtful choices you can today that will lead to a better future.
Steve's Thought of the Day
Stop drifting and hoping a magic solution will appear. Instead, you can participate in rescuing yourself. Find peace by pursuing facts through trusted advisers and research rather than the blind trust of salespeople trying to sell you something by almost any means necessary.
Steve's Thought of the Day
Make decisions to deal with your debt with logic and facts, not assumptions, and worry about what other people will think. People who judge you will soon be forgotten. Nobody thinks about anyone that much.
Steve's Thought of the Day
The world is nothing but constant change. Your life is only a perception. Choose a way out of debt based on facts, not assumptions. Do what is best for your future because those that judge you will not feed you.
Steve's Thought of the Day
Do you have a greater responsibility to repair your financial past or your financial present and future? Make good choices that allow you to tackle your debt and immediately start building your emergency fund and saving for retirement. Tomorrow will be here before you know it. Lost time is a sin.
Steve's Thought of the Day
There is no sense in wasting a perfectly good financial mistake. Instead, learn from it and do better moving forward. The past is gone. Turn and face the future now.
Steve's Thought of the Day
Those who judge you for past financial mistakes are not your friends. So don't make choices about your future out of fear of what they may think. Instead, make choices based on truth, fact, and what is best for you moving forward from today.
Steve's Thought of the Day
Don't believe everything you think. Challenge your assumptions about getting out of debt. Do what is best for you, not others.
Steve's Thought of the Day
Is it less moral to file bankruptcy or to not take action that leaves you old, broke, hungry, and dependent on others?
Steve's Thought of the Day
If bankruptcy is so bad, why did our Founding Fathers specifically include it in the U.S. Constitution as protection for financial difficulties?
Stop listening to people that say bankruptcy is a last resort. It is neither first nor last. It is a tool like credit counseling, debt settlement, and others. For the best result, you need to use the right tool for the job.
Steve's Thought of the Day
People that tell you to avoid bankruptcy want to sell you something else are repeating something they heard or do not know what they are talking about. Get the facts and then make your own decision. Don't let an unskilled script-reading commissioned salesperson make life decisions for you.
Steve's Thought of the Day
Debt problems are like fingerprints. No two are alike. A one-size-fits-all solution will give you a one-size-fits-all result. You deserve better.
Steve's Thought of the Day
You are not your debt. Your value, self-esteem, and existence should not be defined by the money troubles you may be facing right now. Debt problems are solved with proper action, not guilt, self-hatred, and disgust.
Steve's Thought of the Day
Debt is nothing more than math wrapped in emotion. The math is easy, the emotional part leads us to do impulsive things. Not the right thing.
Steve's Thought of the Day
What type of money personality do you have? It is important to know. Take my online test now and discover how you unconsciously deal with money, credit, and debt.
Steve's Thought of the Day
How much retirement savings are you willing to throw away by dealing with your old debt instead of preparing for your financial future? Find how much you will lose by making the wrong choice. Use my online debt repayment calculator now.
Steve's Thought of the Day
Does it make more sense to ask for life-altering debt advice from an unskilled and untrained commissioned salesperson in a call center or an experienced debt coach like Damon Day that provides a customized solution for money troubles?
Steve's Thought of the Day
UK Individual Voluntary Arrangements to Set Record
Last year I predicted it would be a record year for IVAs. There had already been more than 40,000 Individual Voluntary Arrangements, the most-used personal insolvency procedure in England and Wales, in the first nine months of the year and here at ClearDebt we were pretty confident the total for the year would top 50,000.
Well, on Thursday January 27 the Insolvency Service will issue its statistics for the whole of 2014 and we’ll find out. Our estimate is that there will have been 53,649 (non-seasonally adjusted) IVAs in the whole of 2014.
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What is your prediction for how many IVAs there were in 2014?
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Will Insolvencies Rise?
More seriously, our prediction for 2015 is that IVAs will stay at this level (or decline slightly) whilst Debt Relief Orders (DROs) march ever upward, mirroring the continuing fall in bankruptcies. And that’s even before the new DRO thresholds come in in October this year – that will see the two procedures diverge even further.​
Realistically though, who can tell what the year will bring – especially when there is a general election in it. Whichever party(ies) form(s) the next government we doubt their policies will do much to reduce personal debt, or the fact that eight out of ten debtors do nothing to resolve it.
IVAs in 2015
We hope a future government may reconsider bringing in the Simple IVA, which could become an accessible procedure that offers real debt relief and simple administration – and which could see the numbers of informal Debt Management Plans (which are not recorded in the Insolvency Service’s figures but which represent the majority of UK debt plans) plummet.
*Notes on the data: Statistics in this article are taken from the Insolvency Statistics up to Q3 2014.
