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Your answer is here. You can live within your means.

However, what is required of YOU may not be easy. If you are in the middle of a life where you have piled credit card debt higher than Everest, it may be a scary journey toward the nearest base camp. But you might say to yourself, "I am not on a course toward any 'base camp.' Hey, I'm not even a climber!" Well, surprise: the act of carrying balances on high-interest credit cards have placed you in a high-stakes adventure where the freedom to sculpt your life creatively, in the pattern of your choosing, is in question. Failure to chart a course to base camp during this expedition may subject you to an unforgiving cold that robs you of your ability to enjoy anything that life has to offer.

Now, as scary as the game of using credit cards - and adjustable rate mortgages - can sound, you CAN win, where "winning" is not filing bankruptcy, losing your home, and generally not becoming enslaved to working and living to paying off bills. Winning boils down to two ingredients: (1) a plan, and (2) some sacrifice.

I know. Big yawn, right? Another tale of simple solutions. Wrong. For those entangled in the credit game, the following approach works.

(1) To produce the plan, you amass paper artifacts that represent your monthly bills. Get the most recent invoices you can find from Verizon, Comcast, the garbage man, the electric company, the gas company (if your stove or fireplace is heated by oil or propane). Remember to pull out insurances for your vehicle or home and divide that number by 6 or 12 depending on the policy coverage period, when you get to the point of writing numbers down anywhere. Also find the receipts for the grocery store for a month - whatever month seems to represent a normal month. Finally, produce a physical monthly statement for all of your bank accounts and credit accounts so you can determine whether you've missed any monthly obligations like magazine or online subscriptions.

Seem like a lot of paper? This is definitely where fewer is better; for the busy person, possessing too many accounts often results in too little oversight. If you have time to keep track of it all, and there's benefit like shifting money between higher-yield and lower-yield accounts in the course of paying bills, keep the system. If you don't have the time or interest (and be honest with yourself about it), consider closing accounts.

Place all of this paper on the kitchen table. Take a seat and thumb through them to get a feel

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