Credit is normal. True or False?

FALSE!!!

I’ve been listening to the Dave Ramsey pod cast last week and this week. Man, if you need some inspiration/motivation that’s where you need to go! Especially the debt free Fridays where families travel to the plaza just to yell ‘We’re DEBT FREE!!’ It’s awesome! And it’s soo possible!

If you get a chance, listen to the 4/21/2011 pod cast. It talks about how credit cards started…

In 1956 there were no credit cards.

The Diner’s club was the first piece of plastic in NYC & you paid your bill once a month.

In 1970 only 15% of Americans had a credit card.

In 1978 American Express cards were only issued to millionaire’s or someone making a significant amount of money.

Somewhere in the 1980’s all the banks discovered that they can make extreme levels of profit by loaning out money @ 18-32% interest. Debt became the most aggressively marketed product in the history of the world!

It’s not a conspiracy, they are just VERY good at what they do!

Over the past 2 decades debt has become normalized and it’s now the ‘American way’. How ridiculous is that!

Personal finance is 80% behavior.

The Federal govt is 27% over their income.

Normal is broke. Normal is having debt. Normal is living paycheck to paycheck. Sounds to me like normal sucks! I don’t want to be normal about ANY part of my life! I run away from ‘normal’.

We are brain-washed with lies about money and debt and life in general. I’m sooo tired of bad advice! I didn’t even realize until recently about the bad advice people give until now that I know better!

4 people come to my mind that mean well, but have given me horrible advice that has cost me my money & time!

Person #1.) When we went to buy our house, I had 8K to put as our down payment. I was told ‘It wont make that much of a difference to your payments so just keep that money to buy new stuff for your house’. Ugh! What horrible advice! I was halfway on the right track by knowing to put some down, but I was easily talked out of it!!

Person #2) Someone advised us to get rid of our debt. This sounds great, right? They didn’t give us a plan to stay out of debt so I took 5K I had in savings and paid off our credit card. The next month we had a balance of $4500 again. 🙁 UGH!!! Remember, personal finance is 80% behavior!

Person #3.) A mom of one of my friends said this after we told her we are paying off debt ‘Oh, Debt is a way of life’. Good thing we now know better. Debt is NOT a way of life and your life will be more fulfilling when you are out of debt! (Not that money is master here, God is master… He just calls us to be good stewards of His money!)

Person #4.) We are in the process of trying to sell our car to finish paying off this debt & start into babystep #3. (New post about that will come soon!) Well we were told to not sell our car so it can go up in value over the next 10 years and just pay payments on our student loans over the next 20 years. What? Figure up the numbers on that one. Makes no sense! We will NOT be taking advice from broke people!

The point being, just be careful of the advice you take and who you’re taking it from.

I am soooo pumped about paying off our debt! Not in a wicked ‘I want money’ sort of way… Just a ‘motivated excited that we are doing the right thing’ kind of way! I know we have $15,000 left, but it’s only $15,000! The past 7 months have flown by (not at times, but in the big picture it certainly has) I’m trying to embrace the time we have left with our debt. I know that sounds weird, but I’m soaking up all the knowledge and feelings I can get to keep this motivation alive. We’ve been doing great at menu planning and couponing. We are set to save $100/month in our grocery budget that we can put on debt. I’ve been working some overtime and might possibly start a part time job at the church. (where I can still see Jaidan-plus!) It’s temporary but it’s much needed to get what I need to accomplish! We are doing SO WELL at our envelopes and we have SO MUCH saved. In the hill/valley aspect we are definitely on a hill right now. God is just blessing us out the wazoodle!! If we hadn’t gone through our valleys who knows how we would respond to all this right now.