To determine whether bankruptcy is the best route for you, you’d have
to consult with a bankruptcy, as I am not a lawyer and cannot provide
any sort of legal advice. If *all* you have is IRS debt, and don’t
have significant other creditors and/or don’t want the bad credit
associated with bankruptcy, but you cannot otherwise go on a monthly
payment plan, then I would encourage you to consider an Offer in
Compromise to the IRS. It’s a good non-bankruptcy alternative to folks
that might otherwise have no other choice but to file Chapter 7, but
would only be filing chapter 7 because of their IRS debt.

I hope that this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

People need to understand basic financial terms, how the money and banking system works in their country, and how credit, income, and other factors all interplay to produce a person’s overall financial status. Even if people are in a bad financial status and already know that, it’s important to understand how they got there, what all the good and bad stuff means, and how to start making changes.

The absolute best resource that I have ever found on the Internet for basic personal finance information is at http://www.GetRichSlow.com. Seriously, you can delete all your bookmarks to CNN/Money, Kiplinger’s, Motley Fool, and all the other personal finance portals out there and learn everything you really need to know from GetRichSlow.com. The beauty of this web site is that it was put up in 1996 and literally has not been updated since then. This makes all the examples on mortgage rates, housing prices, salaries, college costs, etc. a bit outdated, but the principles themselves are still valid and probably will be for as long as we have our current style of economic systems in capitalist countries.

So, if you’re just starting out, read GetRichSlow.com….every page. It’ll take a couple hours for the average person, but it could quite likely be the most valuable reading you ever do, in financial terms.

Now, when it comes to financial education and business, we enter the world of a very, very, very broad range of things. Here are just some of the things that a new business owner has to think about: how to set up your business entity, how to get paid and accept payments (credit cards, merchant accounts and other methods), how to deal with inventory or drop shipping, how to deal with websites, web hosting, domain names and e-mails, accounting and taxes, business plans, affiliate programs, start up money and financing options, cost analysis, insurance, budgeting, record keeping, licensing concerns, setting goals, staying motivated, and marketing.

Look at it: That’s a boat load of stuff!

And once you start learning all this stuff, it can become overwhelming. The sheer number of books, tapes, courses, gurus, etc. that are out there trying to teach all this stuff is phenomenal. Weeding through it all can itself become a full time job.

Every business owner needs to understand the basics of all those things, too. But where on Earth do you start???

First off, visit your local library or bookstore and grab the most generic looking book you can find about starting a small business. There are some good titles in the “…for Dummies” and “Idiot’s Guide to…” series. Barron’s also publishes a great series on business startup and small business topics. I would also encourage you to look up your local Small Business Administration (SBA) office and see what seminars they have in your local area. They are often free or very low cost. Your local Chamber of Commerce can also be a great resource.

Once you have the basics of all those areas covered, and even after you’ve become proficient in a number of areas, you need to ALWAYS be learning. Continueing education is a requirement in many professions, and it should be important to you as a small business owner, also.

Here’s an example. I like to consider myself fairly intelligent and pretty well educated on the basics of most business topics. When I got into real estate investing a little over 4 years ago, I had to overcome a steep learning curve about real estate, and I continue to learn more and more about real estate and related areas of the process.

Along the way, I took the class to become a licensed real estate broker. I also took a loan origination course, became a certified housing inspector in a very niche specialty, and am also contemplating taking the registered appraiser course next year.

People ask me why I do these things. These courses, certifications, and licensing are all mainly part of continueing my financial education, but they also bring certain perks. For example, being a real estate broker allow me to have direct access to the MLS, quicker comps, and certain databases that my local MLS service subscribes to for agent’s to use. On top of that, it’s a great side income.

Although I don’t actually originate loans, it’s nice to be able to keep up on the changing scope of interest rates and products without constantly bugging my own mortgage broker. In addition, if I ever find a deal that I really want to do for some reason, and saving money on origination fees and closing costs makes the difference between being able to buy the property or not, I can originate my own loan myself and save quite a bit of money.

Being an insurance hazard inspector and now a certified federal disaster housing inspector has taught me many things about what to look for in a property that I didn’t know 2 years ago, and has also provided a steady source of income that helps me get through the ups and down of my other business operations.

And why take the appraiser course? Not to become a licensed appraiser, but to get a better idea of where appraisers are coming from when they do MY appraisals.

All of these things contribute to the overall picture of real estate investor education. I would encourage you to seek similar continueing education in your own area of business. While continueing to learn your trade or business, you might also pick up industry certifications, licenses, etc. along the way that open doors to increased credibility, special resources, and additional revenue sources that might not have existed before.

This is going to be a multi-part series of articles discussing the process of financial recovery. I will be basing this series on both my own experience with financial recovery, which is just beginning as I write this, and the lives of people that I have entered due to their quest for tax debt relief.

The first place to start is to define financial disaster. Just because you’re deep in debt doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re in complete financial ruin. Different people are all going to have their own interpretation of what it means to be financial ruined, but for the purposes of this series of articles I’m going to use my own definition. Here are the things I classify as financially destroyed:

• Straight up insolvency.
• You qualify for chapter 7 bankruptcy.
• You just lost your primary residence to foreclosure (or eviction because you couldn’t pay rent).
• Creditors have seized assets, levied bank accounts, and garnished wages.

There are probably more things I could put on this list, but I think you get the idea. This situation can be created by any number of factors, too. Business failure, expensive medical problems, divorce, inability to pay tax debt, extended job loss, poor money management, stupidity…all of these can contribute to being broke and belly up.

Also, you don’t necessarily need to be homeless and jobless to be financially ruined. There are very high income earners that get deep into debt, just as there are low income earners that turn into millionaires over time.

After defining financial disaster for yourself, the next important step is to take a reality check and admit to the fact that you’re there, or are approaching it. People tend to live in denial when it comes to their financial situation, if they even know what their financial position is at all. It’s important to take stock of where you, including analyzing your income and expenses and looking at your assets and liabilities. If that starts to sound like a budgetary counseling session in progress, it’s because it is. Your finances are one of those few things about yourself and your life that you can distinctly quantify, and you can’t figure out how to get where you’re going if you don’t know where you are.

In the next article in this series, we’ll get into the process of figuring out where you are and making decisions about your plan for financial recovery.

To your success,

_

I just got home from the grocery store, and my shopping bag has quite a few things that I never have in my fridge. These things include

-grapes
-strawberries
-cheese
-blueberries
-pineapple
-blackberries
-raspberries
-hummus
-celery
-whole wheat crackers

All the fruit is made up of those pre-cut plastic buckets of fruit. Why? Because I’m lazy, and that’s the only way I’ll end up eating it.

So, why on earth was this the summation of my shopping trip?

It has a lot to do with the reason I’ve made more progress in the past 12 days towards my Bronze test judge appointment in figure skating than I’ve made in the past 9 months.

First, a few of my all time favorite quotes:

“Successful people do the things that unsuccessful people are unwilling to do.” -John Maxwell.

You don’t need someone else’s permission to become successful. – Dan Kennedy

The path to success is to take massive, determined action. – Anthony Robbins

“The key to success is discipline. What is discipline? Discipline is self-control.” Gunnery Sgt Phil Yoho, USMC, my NROTC officer instructor

People that meet me generally think I’m one of those super-motivated people that takes massive action, and that’s the reason I’ve done so many things in life and had so many opportunities. People that REALLY know me, however, know that simply isn’t reality. By my very nature, I am a lazy, unmotivated, slacker. I am capable of taking massive action, and have a long track record of doing so, but I do it in crazy spurts of productivity that generate necessary results, and these spurts of activity are spurred only when the pain caused by inactivity exceeds some threshold. It’s like rolling a boulder uphill – it’s not gonna happen unless there is sufficient reason to do so. Otherwise, why bother?

There is really only one glaring exception to this generality about myself: I’ll go out of my way simply to find out where a road or trail goes, or to see what’s around or over something. I’m the one that pushes the button to see what happens, and opens the box just to see what’s inside. I’m the cat that curiosity killed.

OK, so what the heck does this have to do with figure skating, or grocery shopping?

I tend to define myself as a person by external things, and am therefore motivated primarily by external stimuli. When I was in the Navy, the military was a massive part of my identity as a human being. It was the thing from which I drew my desire to succeed, and sometimes, my motivation to even live. Once the Navy was no longer a part of my life, it left a gaping black hole that I tried various ways to fill, and they mostly failed.

Roll around to the end of 2007. With my marriage two years gone, my religious faith buried, and my business in shambles, I was having a massive identity crisis, which required massive action. That’s how I ended up with a massive career change and a drastic change in hobbies.

Entering the tax field was one of the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. I truly love what I do, and nearly two years later I have even more passion for what I’m doing than I did when I started. With the new job also came the motivation to start over financially in it’s entirety, thus the Chapter 7 bankruptcy. After filing bankruptcy, my income also started to increase a little, and for the first time in two years I had some actual disposable income. Oh, and a rink on the way to work.

I’d been a figure skating fan my entire life. One day on a whim I stopped in and asked about learning to skate. I went straight to private lessons on public sessions, and was very fortunate to find a coach that I clicked with.

Fast forward, and while I occasionally speed skate, whack a puck around the ice, curl, and shoot, figure skating has become the thing I attach my identity to, along with work.

I’m in a phase of massive action at work, for one very simple reason: I reached the point where I breached the breaking point, and the pain of working long hours and building the systems I’m building will result in a great enough reward at the end to make it worth the sacrifice now. These systems will enable me to increase my income while working remotely, which will satisfy my curiosity to travel the world AND enable me to spend more time doing stuff related to figure skating. Tada – external motivation!

Back to working on my trial judging. Why am I suddenly motivated to advance towards that goal rapidly? Again, simple. Since figure skating is now deeply attached to my self-esteem and sense of self-worth (no matter how bad of a thing that attachment is), my failure to keep satisfactory pace with my goals for my own skating skills has led me to compensate for that failure by shifting my focus back to judging.

It’s probably overcompensation, to be honest. I’ve trialed three test sessions in two weeks, will take my Bronze written exam in a few weeks, and have also started working on test requirements for my Silver appointment, and have registered for the Silver level school at Nationals in January. I have also set things up to start working on my accountant appointment and System Specialist appointment. Yep, that’s officially overcompensation.

And why? Because I’m not picking things up on the ice at the pace I want. And why is that??? This finally answers the grocery question (btw, the cheese cubes, grapes, and strawberries that just became dinner during the course of typing everything above was actually very delicious! and filling! and, OMG! healthy!).

When our rink was shut down in September for maintenance, we all had to skate elsewhere. After a lesson at APEX one morning, my coach and I were talking in the parking lot about food. It’s been obvious for a while that my weight has become a limiting factor in the advancement of my skating skills. I can’t jump any higher, it makes balancing difficult, it kills my flexibility, tires me out faster carrying the extra baggage, etc., etc., etc.

So we were talking about food. One of the biggest things out of that conversation was that I should buy pre-cut, packaged veggies and fruits, that way they’re convenient and I’ll actually eat them. And I will do so, since when I’m sitting in front of a computer, which I do 12+ hours per day, I tend to graze on whatever’s at arms length. That tends to be a lot of chips, soda, cookies, donuts, pastries, chocolate (one of our employee’s moms owns a local chocolate business….that’s dangerous), and things that are microwaveable for lunch and dinner — meals in a bag or a box, which are never healthy. OR…lunch becomes a run to a nearby drive through.

I was hoping that some of the good dietary changes I was forced into at Burning Man would stick with me. I even did that 30 day Mountain House meal challenge, which worked great, for a while.

Throughout all of this, though, I have simply lacked the motivation to make a lasting change.

So why am I now staring a 3 pounds of fruit sitting on my desk?

I want to succeed ON the ice, not just in the judge’s box. I know for a fact that I will consider myself a failure if I don’t achieve certain things, such as eventually getting up to at least my Novice moves, Adult Silver freestyle, pre-silver compulsory dances, and Novice free dance.

I’ll never forget something that Madison said to me one day after practice in the locker room. I was fairly pissed off at myself for having a bad practice session, and she asked what was wrong. My reply was, “I suck!” She looked at me with a strange look and said, “Umm, you just started.” I had been skating for just over a year at that point, but in the grand scheme of things, she was still right – a year is just beginning still. It gave me pause, calmed me down, and is just one of those things I remember sometimes and that I’ll never forget. Kids can be amazingly insightful at times.

Sitting at a 4+ hour test session this morning, after a practice session myself, was motivating as both a skater and as a judge. Talking with Leslie, another trial judge, was part of it, because she’s 45, has a bum knee, and an artificial hip, and she’s got her Senior moves, pre-Gold dances, and at least her Adult Silver freestyle done.

So there it is. Now I have all this fruit to eat. Fun times.

I wanted to write about my battle with overspending on food, too, and lifestyle choices, but writing this kind of drained me mentally. Needless to say, the insane amounts of money I spend every month eating out or on crap at the corner 7-11 are intimately tied to my poor diet, and it is literally my single biggest monthly expense, exceeding my truck payment, my rent, and even my figure skating bill (we’re talking a four figure dollar amount on really, really bad months).

I fix one problem, and I help solve at least three others: overspending, jumps/edges/balance, and self-esteem. Not to mention adding a few years to my life, and making those years more productive.

First, the cost of international airfare is dictated primarily by the time of year which you travel in. Traveling to Australia is the most expensive at Christmas, with round trip flights costing over $3,500 at the cheapest. This is because of the holiday travel rush, and because it’s the height of summer down under, while it’s the height of winter up here in North America at that time. The cheapest time to fly that direction is in April and May, which is the low point of the Australian tourist season.

It also matters what day you fly on. In general, air travel is more popular on weekends, so therefore fares tend to be higher. I found the best deal by leaving at the beginning of the week, and returning at the end of the following week.

I also saved a LOT of money by staying in a hostel, smack dab downtown Sydney. I’m not going 15,000 miles so I can hang out in a hotel room — it’s just a place to sleep and shower, and I probably won’t even be back there EVERY night.

I plan on taking nothing but a carry on bag on this trip. This will be the first time I’ve done this, but it’s based on a Tim Ferriss concept that he calls “Buy It There”. That means to buy most of your toiletries and other items at the location, rather than lugging it around the planet. Here’s my packing list so far:

1. The clothes on my back, including North Face Denali fleece.
2. Two spare pairs of socks.
3. One spare UnderArmour undershirt.
4. A spare pair of light weight REI Adventurer pants
5. Two spare pairs of underwear (UnderArmour and ExOfficio)
6. An outer t-shirt, outer light weight travel shirt
7. Columbia Titanium rain jacket (folds up very tightly)
8. Keen hiking sandals on my feet.
9. Digital camera, spare batteries, charger (we’re filming a movie on this trip)
10. Cell phone
11. Travel tooth brush and small toothpaste – the only toiletry item I cannot travel without
12. Travel sanitary bed sheets (required by most hostels anyway)
13. Ultralight, compact sleeping bivy

I’m considering other items, such as Garmin GPS to do some geocaching, and maybe a Nalgene water bottle. And, I may even ditch the idea of taking spare shirts and pants, and just buying those there if I absolutely need them.

The point of traveling light is, well, just to avoid hassle, but it also save the $50 a bag luggage fees.

On top of all this, I found a Travelocity coupon code: TSOFFERS75. That automatically gave me another $75 off my trip.

So, total cost for airfare and 10 nights in Sydney: $1,016.

I’m sure that I could have found a better deal, perhaps on Kayak.com or something like that, but quite honestly, I was tired of looking and this was the best deal I found in 18 months. So, I’m going. If I hadn’t booked it today, I never would have.

I’m so excited!