10 Simple Steps to Solve Your Money Problems

How to face your financial challenges head on

Finances may be tight year round, but tax season can especially throw you for a loop. You may be making a decent salary, but living paycheck to paycheck.  Increasing prices for everyday items are draining  your vacation kitties and shrinking discretionary funds. The price of gas and groceries continue to escalate--both petrol and milk are nearing $4 a gallon. 

Add to increasing prices the credit crunch and nationwide mortgage foreclosures and you have a recipe for belt-tightening and no small measure of anxiety.

But there's no need to panic. Just follow the plan of action below articulated by Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, founder of GUIDEPOSTS and author of the best-seller, The Power of Positive Thinking. It should put you in a positive frame of mind—and a better position to overcome your financial problems.

1. Believe that for every problem there is a solution.
It may not be the solution you expected, but have faith that the problem will be resolved.

2. Keep calm. 
Tension blocks the flow of thought power; your brain does not operate efficiently under stress. De-stress with long walks, prayer time, meditation, whatever quiets and soothes you.

3. Don't try to force and answer. 
Keep your mind relaxed so that the solution will open up and become clear.

4. Assemble all the facts impartially, impersonally and judicially.
With facts in hand, the problem becomes objective, not subjective.

5. List the facts on paper.
This clarifies your thinking, bringing the various elements into an orderly system.

6. Pray about your problem.
Guidance comes when prayer is allowed to permeate your subconscious, the seat of the forces which determine whether you choose right or wrong actions.

7. Believe in and seek God's guidance.
Make God your partner in solving your financial troubles. 

8. Trust in the faculty of insight and intuition.
Pay attention and be sensitive to ways in which guidance comes—through a conversation, inspired moment, etc.

9. Let your subconscious work on the problem.
Creative spiritual thinking has amazing powers to give "right" answers.

10. Follow these steps faithfully.
The answer that develops in your mind, or comes to pass, will probably be the right answer to your problem.