How A Financial Planner Can Help You Manage Debt
It's quite easy for your debt situation to get out of hand. What may start as nothing more than your student debts could quickly balloon into something else as your mortgage, car loan, and credit card bills come into the mix.
It may seem like your debt situation is unmanageable, but hiring a financial planner can quickly help you to make sense of your financial situation. There are several ways that a financial planning company can assist you in making sense of your debt situation and in planning for a debt-free future.
Budgeting
This is one of the most important things that your planner can help you with. One major problem when you're deep in debt is that you may not know how to prevent yourself from sinking deeper. A budget is an important tool in helping to prevent your descent.
Your planner will need to get a full picture of how you live your life in order to show you where you need to cut back and where you need to focus your repayment efforts. Therefore, they'll need your bank statements, credit card bills, pay stubs, loan statements, tax returns, and any other relevant financial documents.
These documents will help them understand your financial situation and help you to come up with a budget.
Debt Restructuring
There are different kinds of debt. Those with low interest rates and tax deductibility, such as mortgages, are easy to handle. Others, such as credit card debt, need to be handled like toxic waste due to the high interest rates and potential penalties.
A financial advisor can analyze your debt and help you to prioritize repayments. This will help you to discharge the debts that are costing you the most as quickly as possible. This means paying off delinquent and high-interest debt as quickly as possible while also making the minimum payments on the low-interest loans.
Future Plans
Once your planner has helped you to handle the more pressing issues, they can help you to plan for the future as well. Hiring a planner will not get rid of your debt instantly. However, it can help you to reduce your debt levels, and once this happens, you should sit down with your planner to discuss how you're going to handle the debt going forward. It's important to come up with a plan that will ensure you don't end up back in the same debt situation in a few years.