For those of you who are consistently short on funds, perhaps living from paycheck to paycheck, have you noticed that this time of year always seems to be the hardest to get through?

I think that because of all the spending many of us feel obligated to do over the holidays we run up our bills and when they come due in January and February we find that we are short.

We’ve been lucky in that we’ve managed to stay on top of our bills for the last few years, even with me home sick for more than a year. I’m really not sure how we are doing it, particularly when I think back ten years or so, when both of us were working good jobs yet struggled to make ends met. I guess we were living higher than our means back then.

I’ve written before on this site and on one of my other blogs that I’ve had credit problems in the past. When I began my Jewelry business in the late 80’s the expenses ate all of my savings and I not only ran my own company but worked three other jobs on the side to try to pay all of the bills. I even got a room mate in my tiny junior one bedroom apartment.

Still, no matter how hard I worked, the bills were piling up and I was using my credit cards to pay for groceries and toiletry items. When I look back I still feel that I was in a sad state with all my bills.

Naturally, even though I was paying for things with my credit cards that didn’t mean that I could actually pay off the credit card bill each month and it didn’t take long before my credit rating took a nose dive as well.

I never did end up using a Bad Credit Repair service to fix my credit problems. I should have though, because my credit rating would have been better so much earlier than it was. I suppose that if in the early 90’s the internet was what it is today I might have gone looking for information that would have helped me get out of the situation I was in.

Certainly I would have learned something from reading articles such as “Credit Card Bill Consolidation” over at Creditloan.com.

There is a lot of great information on that site about mortgages, credit and loans. If you want to learn more about how to manage your finances better you really should pop over there and start reading some of the great articles.