This guide outlines the top moves you can make towards achieving financial freedom swiftly.
Sometimes it’s hard to understand why so much of adult life is a struggle. When we were growing up, we enjoyed hours and hours of playing and hanging out with our friends. Then, after we graduated from college, we were suddenly thrust into the adult world and faced with the endless grind of work and responsibilities for 40 plus years. So much of our way of living now seems to revolve around the constant effort to get ahead and be able to support ourselves and our families. Sound familiar?
Steps for financial freedom
If you want to be able to truly relax and enjoy life, you have to take some important steps to achieving financial freedom.
Reduce Your Student Loan Payments
One of the first steps you should take when you want to lower your financial stress is to carefully review all of your monthly payments and obligations. After you have made your list, it’s now time to go through the items one at a time and see how you could reduce what you owe each month.
If you are a recent college graduate, it’s quite likely you are carrying a significant amount of outstanding student loans. With rising university costs, it became nearly impossible to get a degree without taking on more and more debt. If you look at refinancing student loans into a new loan, you can save a lot of money every month. When you refinance, you’ll also be able to pay off your note in a shorter amount of time.
Pay Off Your Highest Interest Credit Cards
Once you have reduced your student loan payments, you’ll have extra cash available. You can use that money to further improve your financial situation by paying off your highest interest credit cards. Many credit cards have shocking rates that make it nearly impossible to ever get ahead.
By paying down the highest interest rate cards, you’ll be able to improve your credit score and save even more money each month. Most of the time, if you only pay the minimum due, you’ll never make any progress. Each credit card statement has a box that shows how long it would take to pay the card off if you only pay the minimum, and on one account the answer was 23 years.
Rent Out Spare Rooms in Your Home
In order to generate some much needed cash that you can use to pay your debts down, you could temporarily rent out some of the spare bedrooms in your home. Rental rates, even on single bedrooms, are soaring so you should be able to make really good money this way.
Even in lower rate markets, renting a bedroom to a roommate could bring in a minimum of $700 per month. If you choose to rent the same space via an online vacation rental service, you’ll make even more money even without full time occupancy. With two bedrooms listed on a vacation service, you might be able to bring in $2,000 or more per month quite easily. This is ideal if you have some spare rooms in your home that you are not using.
