Category: The Road to Debt Free

Ok, this is where the rubber meets the road.

February 25, 2016

4 Reasons Why You’ll Never Be Debt Free

Debt Freedom Will Elude You Forever Unless You Do These Three Things

You’ll NEVER be debt free. EVER!

Does that thought scare you? Good. I want you to experience some serious fear when you read that line.

Why, because fear can be an astronomical motivator.

Back in December, I wrote a post giving 7 Reasons Why You Can’t Get Out of Debt. I feel like I need to expand on that some more and share some additional reasons why some people will never, ever get out of debt.

I hear so many people saying that they simply can’t get out of debt.

I get it. Getting out of debt is hard. It takes work beyond what you can imagine for most people.

The reason for that is because many people with debt truly do have more debt than they can handle. Read more

January 21, 2016

My Unintentional No-Spend Challenge

One more step toward success

So, if you’re a writer, you’ll understand this. As I was writing my post for Fruclassity -the site I own along with Ruth from Prudence Debt Free – this week, I started to get super passionate about the subject of saving money. Before I realized it, I was issuing a challenge to readers to spend as little as they could for 30 days. That’s a good idea, I thought to myself after I’d written it.

Then I realized I couldn’t very well offer a challenge like that to our readers without committing to participating in it myself. Oh, crap. I didn’t mean it. I DIDN’T MEAN IT!

A secret you may or may not know about me is that I’m pretty good at pushing myself- within certain limits. I’m a total type-A that goes, goes, goes all the time. But there’s a strict circle around my “pushing myself” that never treads into the waters of “scary” or “highly uncomfortable”. Read more

January 15, 2016

Perspective in Debt Payoff

As we navigate through our debt payoff journey, sometimes I find myself falling into some self-pity modes.

Why did we get ourselves into such a mess?

Why don’t we make more money? Read more

January 7, 2016

What to Do if You’re Serious About Getting Out of Debt This Year

Hey, frugal friends! As I wrote on Fruclassity on Monday, I’ve got a serious itch to dump the remainder of our consumer debt this year and to lower our mortgage as well. Not sure what’s prompting it, but the urge has been going strong for three straight weeks now. The conspiracy theorist in me tells me it’s because America is headed for a nasty financial meltdown, but I’ll spare you from that rant for now. 🙂

Meltdown or no meltdown, it’s always good to get out of debt and to take advantage of those times when your motivation is strongest. So, in that vein, here are some rock solid tips for dumping debt if you’re really serious about becoming debt free. Read more

December 21, 2015

7 Reasons Why You Can’t Get Out of Debt

Here’s Why You Can’t Seem to Dump Your Debt

For years – years – Rick and I struggled to overcome debt. We failed every time. Oh, there were times of debt freedom, but we inevitably fell back into debt again. So what made the difference for us between failing at getting out of debt and succeeding at getting out of debt? One huge key was attitude. We learned to overcome the mistakes that broke people make and to stop believing the lies that broke people believe.

Another vital key was that we learned to understand what it was that was prohibiting us from getting out of debt in the first place. There were several habits and mindsets that were keeping us from succeeding on a long-term basis from dumping debt. Now that we’ve overcome them and are successfully dumping our debt, I thought it would be a good time to share what we’ve learned. Enter, 7 reasons why you can’t get out of debt. Read more

December 7, 2015

4 Ways to Jump Start Your Debt Payoff

How to Jump Start Your Debt Payoff Goal

If you’re just starting a journey to debt free, or if you’re slowly moving along and are needing an extra push, this post is for you. Sometimes as you work toward your financial goals we need to jump start your debt payoff. The benefits of giving your goal a jump start are many. It will help you:

make a serious dent in your debt
force you to make a big sacrifice in order to get used to doing so
motivate you to keep moving toward the finish line

Jump Start Your Debt Payoff

Long-term goals are difficult to keep up with. It’s easier to lose 5 pounds than it is to lose 50, and it’s easier to pay off $1,000 in debt than it is to pay off $10,000, simply because of the time factor. The more time that goes by as you work on your goal, the easier it is to live with the progress you’ve got left to achieve. As I wrote in this earlier post, the enemy of “best” is “good”. Read more

November 11, 2015

When Frugality Was Normal

When Frugality was Normal

In one of my very favorite books, given to me by a friend who knows of my love for the era known as The Great Depression, the subject of frugality arises often. The book, How to Cook a Wolf , written by MFK Fisher, is described on the back cover as being:

Written to inspire courage in those daunted by wartime shortages.

The book, written by what seems to be a quite well-off woman well-versed in frugal living, shares the joy in living a frugal life and practical tips for doing so. You see, up until the early 1900’s, frugality was “normal” in America. It was the way of life. Phrases such as waste not, want not were commonplace in homes. To drive home the magnitude of the differences between life in America now and life in America 100+ years ago, let’s look at some statistics: Read more

November 2, 2015

6 Reasons to Start Paying off Debt NOW

Debt has become such a norm in today’s society that frankly, many people just don’t see the point in trying to become debt free. Debt today is normal. Most people have it, and most people survive “just fine” by making the monthly payments and maintaining the status quo.

I get this mindset. We lived it for over 15 years. I’d never known anyone who lived debt free. Instead, it was touted to us by many as “smart” to use debt to “advance” our way of living. We fell for this belief hook, line and sinker and used debt whenever we thought it was time to “move up” in the world. Read more

October 16, 2015

How to Feed Your Family for $400 a Month Part 1

I’ve gotten several requests lately from readers asking how we feed our family of six for roughly $100 a week. We spend roughly $400-$425 dollars a month to feed our family. One sweet gal brought a smile to my face when she wrote “Do you mean $400 twice a month?” Nope. $400 for the entire month. As I started to think about how to share our tips, I realized that when I was looking online for ways to feed our family for cheap, I wanted details. Details about what they bought, how much they bought and what they served for meals.

So that is what this post (and part 2 of this post) will entail. I think you’ll be surprised to find that we feed our family relatively well on the little we spend. We buy only organic milk, flour, sugar and butter, for instance. We don’t eat a ton of junk. Here are the nitty gritty details on how we feed our family for $100 a week and on how you can feed your family for less too. Read more

September 28, 2015

Without a Reason There’s Always an Excuse

This post was born out of Ruth’s post on Metacognition in Personal Finance that she wrote last week. In it, Ruth shares:

“I know that for all of those years when I maintained and deepened our levels of debt, I wasn’t using metacognition at all. I definitely did as Amy did. When times were extra good financially, I felt a giddy compulsion to spend that extra. I also spent more when things were extra busy. And I spent more when I felt extra anxious about something. I spent more in accordance with bursts of extra love too – especially when it came to one of our children – and at times of celebration.”

Read the rest of this phenomenal post by clicking here.