Today more and more individuals are becoming interested in living a more self-reliant life. This makes it easy to find articles giving you advice about what vegetables to grow and how to grow them or how to raise animals for meat. You can even find articles on how to start making money from your self-reliant life or your homestead. All this information will be extremely beneficial in your journey to become more self-reliant but there has been one area of becoming self-reliant which continues to be over looked. The area I am talking about is the fact you can’t live a self-reliant life when you are reliant on the lenders!

So what does reliant on the lenders mean? Plain and simple it means you are living in debt. It means you need to stop living off of credit cards because you cannot become more self-reliant when you are burying yourself further in debt. You need to learn to live within your means. For anyone who wants to truly become more self-reliant getting out of debt needs to be your first step.

Now you have decided to make getting out of debt your first focus so where do you start? There are numerous financial planning programs out there you can sign up for or books you can read. There is also a wealth of information available on the internet for free. Our family went through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University through our church and I would highly recommend this program to anyone. It can be stressful at times when you have all your money budgeted and you can’t buy yourself things you want whenever you want them but it is well worth it in the long run.

This post is not here to tell you that cannot buy chickens or start your vegetable garden before you get yourself out of debt. It is here to tell you need to learn how to budget those expenses into your financial plan. You can budget whatever you can afford to put towards your new life, whether it is a couple dollars a month of more, but stay within your means. Ensure you plan ahead and determine what unexpected costs may arise throughout your journey and add those expenses to your emergency fund. This will prevent you from having to utilize a credit card during these unexpected circumstances. In the end becoming self-reliant should be an amazing and exciting experience for you not another financial burden so make sure start on the right track.

For more information about Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University click here to visit his website.