It isn’t as simple as it seems to erase financial mistakes. Good intentions get you no where.

I had the opportunity to do something today that I have been meaning to do for months. I paid off another debt. It won’t help me achieve my goal of going back to school. It was small as debts go, but I feel better knowing that this one is taken care of.

I am a long way off from being where I want to be or where I feel like I should be, but today I made a step in the right direction. I know what I want for myself and it is going to take a while to get there. It was so easy to drift off course and into the land of excuses where I lived for far too long.

Now that I am trying to do the right thing with my financial life I see how unforgiving the world can be. How mistakes snowball and people with good intentions are buried under the avalanches of their own mistakes. Yes, this mess is one of my own doing, accepting that has allowed me to come as far as I have in conquering the emotions and actions which have lead me to where I am in my financial life. Not surprisingly, I have also made improvements in the emotional and spiritual sides of my life.

Spiraling out of control or I am going in the right direction?

As an American, I grew up believing the you always paid your bills and that working hard would always bring rewards, but as one of my students told me today I have just been working to pay bills. I have not been building anything, not even the future that I work so hard to assist students in building. There was this hidden expectation that I would not go into debt and if I did I could work my way out it. It was never that simple and the more I tried to get out of the quagmire of debt the further entrenched I became.

So I ran and worked always looking for an easy way out of debt.  It never happened. I never escaped.

Now after taking on a third job and wisely quitting a fourth, I am on probation. Writing whenever I can to fulfill that part of my soul that begs me to write. I know that to be a writer means that I have to write and keep writing. It means that I will literary put hundreds of hours into something that may or may not be make any money and leave me unable to pay the bills that drag me down.

Guess who is in charge of the lottery pool ?

Writing, however, lifts up me and offers me more substantiating hope than the lottery tickets I buy every week.