Listing every instalment and commitment on one sheet

What you'll have at the end

A list of everything you owe, with amount, date and reason, and one monthly figure you can put toward repayment from next month.

Step one: write everything, including what you're embarrassed by

One sheet, four columns: to whom, how much is left, the monthly instalment and its date, and why you took it. Write it all: the phone plan, the car, the furniture from the showroom, what you owe your brother, what you owe the corner shop, a savings circle whose turn you've had and are still paying into. The fourth column, the reason, matters most; whoever doesn't know how they got into debt goes back into it after paying it off.

Add up the second column. The figure will be bigger than you expected, and that's normal. Somebody who did this sum owing the equivalent of nineteen months' income was out in six months, and we'll get to how.

Step two: declare emergency mode on yourself

Emergency mode is a decision that changes every small decision after it: no new instalment contract whatever the offer, no borrowing to pay an instalment, no purchase that doesn't pass the question "does this delay my way out?". It runs from today until the last line on the sheet is closed, which may be six months or two years, but it's declared once and told to the household.

Step three: build the surplus from four items

Go back to your logging month from lesson 2.1 and split spending into what's unavoidable and what can stop. The optional stops entirely for now. Then inside the unavoidable, four items give for most people:

1. Subscriptions: platforms nobody watches. One man found 200 AED a month across four services he watched one documentary on every three days, and kept one.
2. The phone line: moving from a postpaid plan to prepaid cut one bill from 250 to under 100.
3. Transport: public transport or sharing a car with a neighbour who works in the same area saves half.
4. Eating out: for some people a third of the salary. A month without delivery shows the number.

Add up what you freed. That's your monthly repayment surplus, and the next lesson decides which debt it goes to.

Step four: don't repay with all of it

Take 10 percent of the surplus and put it aside every month in a small emergency fund, even while in debt. It looks like the wrong way round, and it's the step that protects the whole plan: the first car repair or doctor's visit without that fund sends you back to borrowing, and six months of discipline collapse in a day.

Step five: raise income for a while

Cutting has a ceiling, and income has none. During emergency mode, every spare hour is for sale: work after hours, a weekend, the skill from lesson 1.4. The man who cleared nineteen months' income in six worked four jobs at once. Nobody asks that of you, but cutting alone won't be enough either.

Where most people trip

At step one itself. They write the formal instalments and leave out the brother and the shopkeeper because "that's not an instalment". It's a debt, and usually the one that presses hardest, because its owner sees you every day. Write everything.

Tonight's exercise

The sheet, all four columns, complete. Then tell one person at home that emergency mode has started and what changes from tomorrow: the first of the four items you're cutting, and the first extra hour you're selling.