How to avoid bankruptcy * stop home being repossessed * get out of debt * how to avoid bankruptcy *pay off debts fast

Many a successful entrepreneur has had to deal with the problem of how to avoid bankruptcy and stop their home being repossessed before making it big. We tend to be risk takers but success is not about how to get out of debt or paying your debts off fast; it is about staying out of debt once you have got yourself out of the financial mire.

Too many people seem to make a career out of being in constant debt and never seem to learn from their mistakes nor change their spending habits. Serial debtors tend to get themselves in the financial proverbial, and as explained on the previous page, look for ways to pay off their debts fast and then go back to committing the same mistakes again.

As explained at the beginning of this article about how to get out of debt, it is possible to lose everything and come back stronger than before providing you are prepared to change. Being made bankrupt or having your home repossessed is not the end of the world, although it feels like it at the time. I know from personal experience how it feels to lose your home. I know the feeling of helplessness, the anger you feel when you close the door and walk away for the last time and the sense of guilt because you realise you could have done things differently.

I also know the sense of achievement when you pick yourself up and start to rebuild your life, the feeling of accomplishment when you start to smell success again, the pride in yourself when you realise you weren't beaten, you were just knocked down. The mark of a champion is not someone who doesn't get knocked down, it is the ability to keep getting up and learn how not to get knocked down again.

If you are facing bankruptcy and investigating your options, you should explore these three options before making any commitment:

Remortgage

Debt consolidation loan

Individual voluntary arrangement

If one of the above solutions can put you back on an even footing, keep you in your home and buy you the time to get back on your feet, then you will be in a better position than I was back in 1992/3 when I lost everything and none of these options were open to me. I was caught up in the property crash with property prices falling, the properties I owned falling into negative equity and no possibility of servicing the mortgages.

There were other business complications as well and despite fighting tooth and nail, eventually I had to resign myself to letting everything go. At the time it felt like I was being punished for something that I didn't know I had done, blamed everyone who had played a role in my downfall and had anger management been around in those days, I would have been the number one candidate.

Mentally, it took me a while to recover; to accept that the business decisions had been mine; that I should have seen the property crash coming and to understood that the banks had always been charlatans and not the nice chaps who had been happy to lend me money all the time I was making them money.

I look back now and realise that I actually lost nothing of any real value. My family remained intact, my closest friends, although unable to help remain my friends and I learned invaluable lessons that I have put to good use to prevent anything like that ever happening to me again. So whilst you may feel that losing your home is the worse thing that could happen to you, believe me, there are things far worse; if you put your mind to it, you will come back, better, stronger and the wiser and if you do have to file for bankruptcy and lose your home it is not the end of the world. You will have been knocked down but providing you get up, you will not have lost.

Interest rates may be rising but they are nowhere near the levels that I had to deal with and property prices are not falling so you don't have to deal with negative equity. Providing you keep your head you will find ways for how to stop your home being repossessed.