Undoubtedly, for most people the hardest part of getting out of debt will be cutting expenses. This is where your mindset and your will power come into play. Also, your vision and goals for your future play a huge role in this part of the ‘getting-out-of-debt-forever’ process. As I wrote in my book, change is the hardest thing we do in life. Changing our spending habits has the potential to expose us to the realities of where we actually put our self worth. It’s easy to say you don’t care about a person’s clothes when you’re regularly buying new clothes. It’s easy to say you don’t care about what kind of car you drive until you actually have to get a 10 year old car or go without a car completely. ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ has been used forever to describe people who are potentially living beyond their means to put on appearances that keep them on par with social expectations of what success looks like. Cutting expenses to get out of debt is damn near the opposite of this notion in the sense that we are making a public declaration that we don’t care how people look at us because we don’t have all the nice things. We don’t want to look like success but feel like failures. We want to be free so we are going to live in a manner that many people in modern society don’t live and would actively believe is a form of failure… but we know better.
Be Willing to Explore Cheap Housing Options
For most of us, housing is going to be our largest monthly expense. My advice to you is to get ruthless with yourself. I’ve known people who were married with kids and sold their house and moved into the basement of their parents house to cut monthly housing expenses. I lived in on-base housing where I shared a community bathroom with at least 20 other soldiers when I first started the Special Forces Qualification Course at Fort Bragg, NC. I knew several fellow soldiers of the same rank and pay as I was who lived off-base because they wanted privacy and convenience. I cleaned up after a lot of grown ass men. I didn’t like it, but it was free and it helped me step on the accelerator towards getting out of debt. There are probably 1,000’s of ways to live cheaper than you are right now. How much cheaper is highly dependent on your ability to deal with change.
- You can get roommates
- You can move in with parents
- You can sell your things and get a much smaller place
- You can rent a part of your own home (The entirety of which will go towards debt. If you are inviting a stranger to live with you, you had better be freeing yourself from indentured servitude via financial indebtedness!)
- On what many would consider to be extreme and probably only if you don’t have kids:
You could live in your car. Shower at the gym (Get a gym membership. You’ll need the mental and physical relief)
The point is to get creative and get ruthless with yourself. If people judge you for it, whatever. Actions like these let us know we are stronger than we thought we were. Actions like these also teach us humility and give us a bit more perspective on the person who might be living on the street. We have the privilege of being able to choose these situations for the short term in order to make life more comfortable in the long term. Whatever idea you choose to implement, it will probably be difficult in the short term but I promise you your freedom from financial anxiety will be worth it in the long term.
Be Willing To Explore Cheap Transportation Options
The first 18 months I was in the Army I didn’t have a car. I walked, got a ride from a buddy, or I just didn’t go anywhere. Army bases are pretty drab places and sometimes living on base felt like I was in some kind of open prison environment. I had to always be alert because even on off hours, rank still mattered. I was 25 years old with no car and living in a little room I shared with 2 other guys and using a community restroom I shared with 20 other guys. Again, humility will be a large part of this process. When I did get a car, I paid $3000 cash for it. It was 2009 and I bought a 1999 Nissan Altima. Remember, before I had given up a car for repossession because I couldn’t make payments after I left the engineering field. The feeling of having a car that was paid for and having money to make repairs when I needed was amazing. This while still paying off debt.
When I got out of the military and was working as a personal trainer, I needed to keep expenses low because I didn’t have much income coming in. To save on gas I started riding a bike to the gym everyday. Eventually, I moved closer to the gym and would walk from time to time.
Again, the point of these two examples is to help you understand that cutting expenses is about the willingness to live (in some cases) a dramatically less comfortable lifestyle than you had before. Walking is free. Riding a bike is significantly cheaper than a car. Riding the bus is significantly cheaper than a car. When I was little, my mom would take me with her on the bus to go to the grocery store. She’d stock up on groceries and we would carry all the bags back to the bus stop and on the bus going home. We’d carry them from the drop off point to our apartment there in Southwest Houston. I know it wasn’t comfortable but she was doing what she had to do to keep expenses low. If you’re in debt, I strongly encourage you to be willing to forgo short-term comfort, for long term freedom.
Other Expenses, Find Creative and Ruthless Ways to Cut ‘Em!!
Food – Dave Ramsey is big on beans and rice and I agree. At a minimum, if you’re eating out every week the frequency has to be cut back or the restaurant has to get cheaper and preferably, both. The side benefit of cooking your own meals at home is you’ll be healthier which will also save you money in the long run.
Clothing – I didn’t buy a single piece of new civilian clothing during the three years I was getting out of debt. I had to buy new uniforms from time to time because they would get destroyed during training but we got a stipend for that. I would wear my tan military issue undershirt when out on the town, I had a pair of jeans, and a couple of civilian jackets for winter. These were all clothes I had before joining the military. I had to hear lots of trash talk from fellow soldiers when I would show up to go to a restaurant in old jeans and a tan t-shirt from our uniform, but I didn’t give a damn. I stayed focused on the mission which was freedom.
Entertainment – Movies, vacations, concerts, day trips, whatever you can think of… Except for the occasional movie with buddies, It didn’t happen. If I wanted to decompress I read books and rented movies for $1 from the Redbox machine on base. I watched the movies on my laptop.
Laser focus people. The more ruthless you are with yourself, the faster you get free. Once you’ve cut expenses to the bone, fill up some of your time by finding a second job and working. Doing this will occupy your mind and you’ll be too tired to go out and spend money on stupid stuff.
Saturate Your Mind In Positive Content About Money
One of the real benefits of going through the process of paying off debt and cutting out so many expenditures is the space it gives you to focus on building the life you want. My time in school growing up left me with a real loathing for reading. I was always being assigned reading that I didn’t care about and that didn’t seem pertinent to my very real problems. One of the things I realized during this time was that I didn’t understand money and I needed to commit to learning. The first money book I read was The Millionaire Mind by Thomas J. Stanley. This was probably in early 2009. I remember being so encouraged to see that many people who had accumulated significant wealth in their lives had done so in part by living frugal lifestyles well within their means. So much of my thinking around money up until this point centered on needing to earn a super high salary in order to be financially comfortable but this book helped me begin to understand otherwise.
I mentioned it was 2009 when I read that book. The smartphone wasn’t well developed yet. Blogs were just starting to get some momentum and wifi wasn’t everywhere like it is now. People, if you’re in debt you’re going to need to saturate your mind with the stories and wisdom of other people who have been there. The austere conditions of my military life were a perfect pairing with the ruthless expenditure cutting that I needed to implement to get out of debt. I said this in the last post but being a candidate for Special Forces meant going out to the field a lot, eating free food, and living in free housing (even if that housing was the woods sometimes). While I’m out there focused on getting through training my paychecks are coming in and my autopay from my checking account is knocking out my debts. Most of you will not be in this position.
Most of you will need to work multiple jobs. Many of you probably have children. Most of you will need to get roommates or move in with family. You will have to make changes that punch you in the gut and you need to use podcasts, blogs, youtube videos/social media content, and books to constantly remind you of why you’re making sacrifices. Dave Ramsey has tons of people with Debt Free Stories. There are a multitude of podcasts out there about personal finance. J.L. Collins has lots of great advice about investing but also about money in general with lots of personal stories from guest posts. Today we have the power to cultivate our media consumption to fit our psychological/emotional needs. Don’t allow yourself to doom scroll about the economy when you could be listening/watching/reading stories from people like me and many others who found their way out of financial chaos.
Use technology to build and fortify the mindset to destroy your debt and never be on defense again when it comes to money. You can do this!
Here are some links to books, podcasts, and websites that I’ve found Extremely helpful for learning about money:
Websites
Dave Ramsey (Getting Out of Debt and More)
JL Collins (Investing)
Mr Money Mustache (Great For Learning To Live Frugally)
You Need A Budget (YNAB.com) (The Name Says it All)
Books
Total Money Makeover (Getting Out of Debt)
The Simple Path To Wealth (Learning To Invest)
Podcasts
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Travis Daigle 