Jill, a mother of three, needs help scraping by during her family's financial challenge. "After being six months without employment, and I'm basically the only one bringing in income, how can we recover right now and not only maintain but try to get ahead again?"

The good news? They have no credit card debt. The bad news? They're two months behind on their mortgage. "To keep your home…you either have to get another job, make more money at your current job, or you have to sell your home and buy something you can afford," Suze says. "If you can't afford your home, you have to sell it. Because if you don't sell it and you continue to be behind on your mortgage payments, they will foreclose on you and they're going to take it from you anyway."

Suze says a lot of people buy homes they unknowingly can't afford because they didn't understand the financial ramifications of what it actually costs to buy a home, pay property taxes, pay insurance and pay for maintenance.

To help others avoid making this mistake, Suze shares her rule of thumb for buying a home. "To own a home, it usually costs you 40 percent more than your mortgage payment," she says. "So if you have a mortgage payment of $2,000, it's going to cost you $2,800 a month to really own that home."

Before Jill gets any deeper into debt, Suze asks her to call her mortgage company—and other creditors—immediately to see if there is some kind of compromise. "The biggest mistake we make is when we hide from the truth. And when you don't confront those that you owe money to, you are disrespecting them and you're disrespecting yourself. And when you disrespect yourself, you render yourself powerless," Suze says. "When you are powerful, you attract people. When you are powerless, you repel people. Since people control money, you're literally, when you're powerless, you are repelling money at a time in your life when you need money more than you've ever needed it before. Where does one get power? Power resides in the truth. And the truth resides within you."

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