Janet’s Book Nook

Debt payments no fun

Future needs to be secure

Old age can be fun

I guess Haikus aren’t really my strong point. I should probably stick to what I know. Apparently I know a few things about Debt relief and saving for the future. I found a site called Bills.com and they have a fabulous quiz that you can take that will give you a score on what your Bill IQ is. Mine happens to be a B-86%. Certainly there is room for improvement. It seems my strong suits are wealth and life plan. That means that I have done a good job of securing our future. We have set up our retirement plans and have diversified them so that we can achieve growth while still having some protection built in.

Where am I failing? My lowest score was an 81 on debt. This is because we have more debt on credit cards than we should. We pay all of our cards on time and we always pay more than the minimum but we do carry a balance on all or most of our available cards. It was shocking to see that debt and credit are really what keeps us from being able to stock away more than a month’s worth of emergency fund. I knew we were carrying too much debt but this quiz really helped me to see that our debt could be keeping us from achieving some of our financial goals.

One of the things that I like about this site is they take you through each answer you provided and tell you the positives or negatives of that answer. They also provide you with ways to help change that answer and give links to companies that can help. This could mean mortgage refinancing, debt consolidation, credit reporting companies and other businesses that can help people with financial needs. It not only gives you the problems it gives you ways to solve the problem.

Everyone should take this quiz or one like it at some point to see where they stand and what areas are lacking. You can’t start to resolve issues if you don’t know what the issues are. The first step to securing your financial future is knowing both where you are and where you are trying to get.