I call them gremlins because it's as if the consequences are not from your own doing...that something outside of you is causing these difficulties. The circumstances differ but the end results keep happening no matter what you do, or so it seems.

What is working against you is the entrenching of habits or behavior patterns. Once the cycle starts, it's as if it completes itself without your knowledge. In a way, that's true...the cycle follows a rut that has been reinforced many, many times and leads to the same outcome.

So the first gremlin that I'm going to help you wrestle to the ground is Debt. Many clients are confused by their debt when they first come to see me. They make good money, and often have paid down (or off)  their debt, but it keeps reappearing. Some of my clients haven't been able to pay their debt off in years.

It isn't always credit card debt. It also can be income tax debt that can accumulate at an alarming rate particularly for the self-employed.

The debt cycle looks something like this: it starts because something happens that is outside of the normal cash flow. The expense is necessary so it gets placed on a credit card. Then great intent and effort are placed toward paying that off as soon as possible.

Often, they do pay it off, only to have something else show up that is outside of the cash flow. This is the beginning of a cycle that won't end until you take into account all the expenses that are a part of your lifestyle. This includes the income tax bill at the end of the year.

Many people pay attention to their bills, and perhaps have a working knowledge of their groceries and gas, but aren't fully aware of the one-time, non-monthly, or irregular expenses that are a part of their lives. It's these expenses that end up on credit cards when they occur: car servicing, holidays, travel, gifts, large insurance payments, stuff for the kids, and tax payments (which aren't necessarily paid with credit cards but cause other things that month to go onto cards).   These are only a few of the most common, and each household has their own list of expenses like these.

Until you find a solution for these expenses, you will be repeatedly using credit cards or draining money you thought you were putting aside as savings. Often you are accidentally spending more than you make because you're not taking these expenses into account.

If you want to get rid of this particularly gruesome gremlin, here are the steps:

• Analyze your credit card bills for the last 3 months, 6 months, or year: set up columns for the items you see and put down the amounts. These are the expenses that you're not accounting for. Figure out the annual amount of this list.
• Each month, you need to put 1/12 of this amount into a separate account so that when these expenses show up, you can pay them from this account. This is your debt prevention.
• For the self-employed, look at your tax return, both State and Federal. On the second page, you'll find a line that ends in the words Total Tax.   Add those two numbers together and divide by the top line on your Schedule C. This is the percentage you need to be putting into a savings account from each deposit to be your "withholding" for income taxes.
• Stop using credit cards unless you have money in the bank right now to pay for the item. If you're in a hole, stop digging. You also can't borrow your way out of debt...sounds good but it doesn't work.
• Choose a moderate amount that you can pay and continue to pay toward your debt each month and every month, and forget about the debt. One day, it will be gone.
• When you finish paying off one debt, take that amount and add it to the next debt payment so that you can get out of debt even faster.
• When all your debt is paid off, you have that overall payment amount to put into savings each month because you've learned how to live without it.

The debt-cycle gremlin doesn't have to run your financial life. You can get back into the driver's seat and take yourself to a debt-free future.