Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Talking about being debt free, having a debt free journey for probably about three years now. Like completely and totally debt free. No house payments, no car payments, no student loans, no nothing. Nothing at all.
[00:00:17] And consumer debt, which is like car payments, student loans, credit cards, anything aside from the house, that is debt that has been paid off for about five years, six years now.
[00:00:32] It's amazing, it's an amazing feeling to be out of debt there. It's true like because we listen to Dave Ramsey, right? It's true like what they say, like what he's saying. Like it's freedom. It's basically you feel free.
[00:00:49] And I'm a truck driver. I'm a truck driver.
[00:00:53] At the time my wife was an paramedic.
[00:00:59] A lot of overtime, tons of overtime, trying to get, you know, working on getting out of debt.
[00:01:06] My mom watched my daughter, excuse me, while that had happened.
[00:01:12] She so my daughter really doesn't understand what being in debt is, does my, my son.
[00:01:21] Because they're both, they're both, they're both born into us, my wife and I not having debt.
[00:01:29] And it's an awesome feeling.
[00:01:32] What can I talk, what can I talk about for the people that are on their debt free journey?
[00:01:39] What I can talk about is the, a lot of the social policing that goes on.
[00:01:46] Social policing meaning like people saying that no, you shouldn't get out of debt.
[00:01:51] This is how society does it.
[00:01:54] So you should stay in debt, you should get a credit card and maintain it and maintain your credit score. All this other stuff, you're going to live like this, you're not going to have the nicest things, you're not going to have the nicest car, yada yada, you're not going to have the big screen TV or all this stuff. Like and my wife and I, we knew that going in, knew that going in that we knew certain things going in, right? Like that we had to ignore the, the people there trying to socially police us, right? We had to ignore them. We knew that going through it was totally different because it's just, it was just me and my wife with the only ones going through it. Nobody could go through it with us because we were the only ones paying the debt off.
[00:02:43] When we started paying off debt, we sold a lot of stuff.
[00:02:47] We sold a big, a big tv, put that money, we put that money that we, we got, we put it towards the debt. Like we, it was, it was insane. I sold several instruments, guitars, bass guitar, amplifiers, just to get out of debt. Because we were so, we think about it, we paid off debt paid off $46,000 in less than two years.
[00:03:15] Sounds insane, but it's possible.
[00:03:20] When you put your head down and work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work.
[00:03:34] When we got to about, like, the last. The last year, the last six months, seven months of paying off the rest of our debt, which was the hugest debt, which was the. The.
[00:03:48] Our student loans, everything was going to that because that's what was left. We paid off before that. We paid off credit cards, we paid off Best Buy. We paid off the rent. The rent, a center, like, all the. All the main bills that we had, but the biggest one was my student loans.
[00:04:07] And we were seeing. It was like, thousand. Like, thousand to $2,000 just going boom. Just going straight to. To the debt, that student loan debt.
[00:04:18] And we was like, thinking, like, dang.
[00:04:21] And we would have the money in our hand. Like, all this money is going to be ours when we. When we finish paying off the debt. Like, we're going to have all this extra money in our pocket.
[00:04:35] And so that was an awesome feeling to be able to say, to see that we were going to have that.
[00:04:41] And people, like, we told people our story, and they're like, wow, how did you do that?
[00:04:46] Yada yada. And you can tell that they want that.
[00:04:50] Hold on a second.
[00:05:13] My camera was crooked. It still is crooked.
[00:05:19] All right, bear with me here, guys. Okay. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Total technical difficulties. And I couldn't. I couldn't stop myself from doing it. My ADHD got in the way. Yeah. Getting out. So it was insane. Like, a lot of people, we told a lot of people, and people were like, wow, that's cool. And you could tell some people, really, some people wanted that. Some people were watching those videos because I was posting our journey on Facebook, and I could tell some people really wanted that. Like, how did you do that? How did you do this?
[00:05:50] It takes work. Like, it takes work. And people are still social policing me and us, because my. My car is 2006. My car's almost 20 years old. It's a Honda Civic.
[00:06:08] And it's like, are you.
[00:06:10] We. And the way we do it, too, like, if we want a new car. So we. We'll save up the money because we have the cash flow to be able to save up pretty quick to buy a new car.
[00:06:20] Like, we. In less than a year, we could buy a brand new car if we wanted to, or. Or a nice used car for, like, $10,000 if we really wanted to. Because.
[00:06:31] And. And. And the way to do it is to save that money. Like, it's like the old school way of thinking. Like, if you don't have the money for it, then you can't buy it.
[00:06:44] Which is a principle that I'm teaching my daughter. Like, you have to work for your money because she works, she works in the house, she cleans her room, she gets paid.
[00:06:53] And if she wants a toy, makeup, jewelry, whatever, whatever stuff she little girls want, she's got, she knows that she has to save up for it and buy it, buy it, buy cash, you know, and that is like unheard of nowadays because everybody has a credit card. Everybody wants to go, go out shopping on Saturdays because they work hard during the day, during the week. And like, the attitude is like, I want to go spend money. And my added. Our attitude changed after getting out of debt. Our attitude was like it. Before we got out of debt. It was really like a spending attitude. Like we, we felt like we had to go and spend money.
[00:07:42] We felt like we go, we had to go and spend money every weekend because it, it was just a thing to do. You have that.
[00:07:49] It's like an urgency or like an addiction to like spending.
[00:07:55] And then we would get to the point where our, the credit card was maxed out or we didn't have money and it's. And we wanted to buy more and more and more and then we get upset, then we will fight and we just, my wife and I just knew that we had to, that there had to be some type of gift, there had to be some type of change. And that's when I found out about being debt free, financial freedom and all this stuff, right? And I was like, oh, okay, so you're saying that we don't have to have a credit card?
[00:08:23] You know, it's possible to do it like this, you know, and, And then once we figured that out, we're just like, okay, we're all in.
[00:08:37] So a lot of that mindset had, it has changed since then. When we were getting out of debt, we had to unlearn how to, we had to unlearn that we don't have to spend money to have fun.
[00:08:49] We don't have to spend money to be joyous.
[00:08:51] We found the public park, the public pool.
[00:08:58] That's what we found.
[00:09:00] We were just like, okay, what can we do?
[00:09:03] And, and we, and we've learned to enjoy staying home.
[00:09:10] Like, we have movies here, we have games, we've got books, we've got things here.
[00:09:17] I'm trying to show you my, trying to show you my bookshelf. But it's messy back there.
[00:09:24] We have stuff that we can do that we don't have to do with money. We learn how to go to the park, the pool, be home.
[00:09:31] You know, we don't always. It's okay to be home all day on a Saturday. Why not? You find stuff to do, you know, and that's, and that, and that's just that short amount of time for, of getting out of debt. Because once you get out of debt, then you actually have money to go, spend to go to the movies, you know, go out, drive out of town, spend, spend, spend the weekend out of town or something, go on a trip, you know, because when getting out of debt, you learn how to be responsible. I learn how to be responsible with money because my wife and I, we had to have a budget. We had to develop a budget because we had other expenses along with paying off debt. We had phone bill, cable bill, inch, car insurance, home insurance, you know, all the stuff that we paid monthly subscription. We got rid of a bunch of subscription services that we didn't need, like the gym, you know, we got a Netflix. We got it rid of Amazon. That was like during getting off debt, but after getting out of debt, we've got more, we have more subscription services than we had before. But we can, because for doing a budget and being responsible with the money we decide we found out, like, okay, now we can have subscriptions if we wanted to because like, now we can pay for YouTube Premium. We don't have to deal with ads because there's no debt, there's no money that goes to car payments, loans, you know, all this stuff.
[00:11:04] So learning how to be content, like going to the park or going to the pool, watching movies at home, being content at home without go, having to go out and spend money during, during getting out of debt. It's just that little temporary time.
[00:11:19] And for those, those two, less for those two years of getting out of debt, we still have a budget and we still are responsible with our money to where it's like, do we even want to go out? You know what I mean? Like, you know, it's, it's like we learned to be content with just going to the park and having money in the bank.
[00:11:46] We learned how to be content to just go to the movies every, you know, every three weeks or every two weeks, whatever, you know what I mean? We learn how to, to buy gear. Like, I bought this microphone, I bought a camera, I bought a mixer for my microphone because we had the money to do it. Like cash. Boom. No Debt, no credit card.
[00:12:09] Get cut. The middleman out. Just here, two paychecks. Boom. Here's all my gear.
[00:12:15] It's amazing. Like, it's amazing to be debt free because you don't. You don't have to like, you don't have to be at like. Another thing too is I don't have to be at work worried about paying, paying that payment every month.
[00:12:33] Like, I could afford to be like, okay, I don't have a load today. I'm a truck driver. I don't have a load today. Okay, cool.
[00:12:40] You know, eventually I'll get a load and have that money coming in.
[00:12:43] And in the end of, my wife works as well. You know what I mean? The two of us work.
[00:12:50] It's. It's like, it's freeing because it's like, oh, no money from. For this week from work, because work is slow. Okay, cool. No problem.
[00:13:01] As opposed to before when I wasn't dead. Like, oh, shoot, I need to work. I need to. I need to figure out. I need a hustle. I need to figure out how to make this money to pay the loans. And now it's just like, man, all good, you know, and there. And like, even now we can go. Like, we had to. We had to drain the savings because we had to do some work on the house. We had to do some plumbing, some electrical, some other things that the house needed, right? Because the house, the plumbing was really old. We had to change the vent line, then went from the. The plumbing up I. Up and out of the house.
[00:13:37] The, the drainage system, the electrical system underneath the house was, Was trash. So we had to put another, you know, pay a bunch of money. So the emergency fund that we had had, which. That's another topic that I could talk about. The emergency fund that we had had was depleted, right?
[00:13:55] So we had to go back into that mode of saving or, or getting out of debt mode to restock the emergency fund.
[00:14:06] And it was like, that took like, like a month, two months.
[00:14:09] And we're just like, okay, for, for four weeks, for five weeks, we're just gonna save everything. We've done this before. We've. We've. We've gotten out of debt. It took us two years, but we're only going to take two months. Fine. So we just work and work and work, save whatever, whatever. Whatever is left over at the end of the budget for that week, for that month. Boom. Throw it back into the emergency fund. Emergency fund stocked up.
[00:14:34] Now we can go back to being a little. A little bit. Somewhat luxurious, you know, by eating out, going to movies, whatever. That's another thing we did too when getting out of debt was we stopped eating out, we had a grocery budget, we took lunch to work.
[00:14:57] Now like we can eat out whenever we want.
[00:15:00] Pretty much like it's we. I mean we do.
[00:15:03] You can tell I got a little belly here. But like you sacrifice those however long it's going to take you to get out of debt. I mean it took us two years, guys. And we get, I think we get stuck. Like even me, I was stuck in the mentality like it's going to take me 15 years to get out of debt because my, my student loans are accruing interest every year and it's going to take long. And that was actually, that was actually like paralyzing me and stopping me from starting to pay off debt because I was deferring it. I was like, you know what, I'll start paying it off next year. I'm still looking for a job, whatever, yada.
[00:15:45] But no, like it doesn't take that long if you're really focused and, and stop eating out. Get rid of the subscription service, sell some stuff. Like all that stuff that. Cuz my coworker one day he called me a Dave Ramsey purist because I was getting out of debt and he was making fun of me.
[00:16:06] And the reason why I bring that up is because like the stuff that Dave Ramsey talks about, like it's really actually true.
[00:16:13] Not, I mean this, the stuff regarding like financial freedom, being debt free.
[00:16:21] Like where he says like rice and beans, beans and rice. Like we didn't eat rice and beans. Beans, rice, literally. But we, we had a budget. We took sandwiches to work, we took yogurts. You know, we stopped eating out for lunch.
[00:16:35] Not entirely. Like every now and then we would be like, I want a burger. So we'll get a burger, whatever.
[00:16:41] As a reward. Like, like for instance, we'll put. We would pay off a small credit card that was like 200 paid it offered. We would celebrate by like going out to eat, you know, little stuff like that every now and then. You know, reward yourself. Ma', am, I've been six months just paying off stuff. Let me, let me buy myself something. You know what I mean?
[00:17:04] Yeah. So what he, what Dave Ramsey talks about is, I think it's is true, like, like live on beans and rice. Rice and beans. Not literally, but what that means is you, you, you buy stuff from the grocery store and you take it to lunch and eat it. Or you cook, you cook your dinners at home, you cook your Lunch at home. You cook your breakfast at home instead of eating out. That's what I think. That's what rice and beans, beans and rice means. And that's what we did.
[00:17:31] Sell some stuff. We sold a bunch of stuff, sold guitars. I, so I had like, I, let me see. I had a seven string electric guitar, I had a five string bass guitar. I had a classical guitar and then I had a bass amp, a guitar amp, that's five instruments.
[00:17:52] Sold those and paid off.
[00:17:55] I had this debt with this person. It was like $500.
[00:18:00] I sold like two guitars. Boom. Paid that guy off. Don't have to deal with them ever again.
[00:18:05] So sell some stuff.
[00:18:08] What else?
[00:18:10] Make a budget. Live on less than you make. Like all that stuff that Dave Ramsey says as far as getting out of debt goes works like it really, really works. And that, that was the.
[00:18:21] And, and we would listen to him, we would listen to his calls like of the people getting out of debt like us. And that was helping us too because we were thinking like it's possible, like there's other people that are doing it too. So we didn't feel alone. That's another thing too. We didn't feel alone. We're getting out of debt because we knew that there was other people working on the same goal. And which is the main reason why I'm making this video for the people that are trying to get out of debt.
[00:18:46] Look, I'm a living testimony to doing it.
[00:18:50] And I'm a truck driver. I make truck driver income locally where I live. And my wife was a paramedic at the time. She switched careers. So she makes a little bit more money now. But that those types of salaries, it's possible, you know what I mean?
[00:19:06] We're not doctors, we're not freaking engineers or nothing like that. We're blue collar people. And you have to decide, you have to pick your like pick your poison, like decide what you want to do and go at it and do it and know that there's going to be social police people saying no, you can't do this, you shouldn't do this. You should do it like this. You should maintain your credit score. You should maintain a credit card and paid off every month and all this stuff. I'm like, no, I don't want to do all that. Like even now that's too much work. And like what to create to uphold a score? Like no, why do I involve, why do I want to involve my hard earned money to, to keep my credit score at a certain level there maybe there Are some guys, like, I've seen some real estate gurus, they need a credit score and this and that. La la la. But I don't want to know. I don't want that.
[00:20:04] And we have to tell those people that are trying to social police us like, no, I don't want that. I want this. I've seen people getting out of debt. They look happy.
[00:20:13] I'm gonna try it out. And we're still debt free to this day. It's been five, five years. Completely and totally out of debt.
[00:20:21] It's funny how the, how the light shifts, the ISO shifts whenever I move around with this camera. It's funny.
[00:20:29] Maybe I should just set it, set the ISO to like a thousand or 8, 800. Sorry, I got sidetracked. Thank you, guys.
[00:20:36] Yeah, so getting out of debt is huge.
[00:20:41] And you have to ignore the naysayers, you have to ignore the people that are trying to police you and say no.
[00:20:50] You have to tell them no. Like, I know you have to tell them. Like, I know the way you doing it is working. I see you doing it, it looks well.
[00:20:59] And let me tell you. But I'm gonna do it this way, right?
[00:21:02] And let me tell you something I learned about what actually social policing is for the person trying to police you.
[00:21:10] It is.
[00:21:15] Like for one reason is that the person that is trying to tell you no, like don't do it like this, you do it like this instead. Or they're trying to keep you in a box. Basically, they're trying to keep you bound. They're trying to control you.
[00:21:28] Is is because maybe it makes them look bad. Maybe they've tried to get out of debt, but they didn't and they, they, they went with the crowd and now they're trying to bring you with them to the.
[00:21:38] So when it comes to people like that, you just got to tell them no, tell them no enough times, stand your ground and eventually they'll leave. Go try to find other people to control.
[00:21:50] And it's pretty, it's. It seems like a sad existence to me if, if those people are trying to do that to you. So. And that's in anything in life, like with being with financial freedom, with, you know, your side hustle, the way you make money, the way you raise your kids, how your marriage is. Like, people are always trying to control every aspect of your life. Like certain people, not all of them. And that's one of the things that I try to avoid, that I want to avoid in my lifestyle. So the takeaway for getting out of debt, the Takeaways for like the actual, actual takeaways and things that you can practice in your life for getting out of debt.
[00:22:33] 1. Ignore the naysayers, tell them no and continue to do you, if you're married, work together with your spouse, have the same bank account. Get on a budget. Make a zero based budget.
[00:22:47] See what's coming in, see what's going out. Put it on a piece of paper if you have to. You don't have to use a fancy spreadsheet. Just get a piece of paper, write it out, tack it to the fridge, you know, magnet it, magnet it to the fridge. That way you look at it every time you go to the fridge.
[00:23:05] Ignore the naysayers, make a budget. Get on the same page with your spouse if you're married. What else?
[00:23:11] Sell some stuff if you need to, to get out of debt.
[00:23:14] I mean, take a look at all the stuff that's in your apartment or your house and decide, do I really need this for this amount of time that it's probably going to take?
[00:23:26] Sacrifice, Sacrifice for those two years or one year or however. I mean, what is it? I. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, sacrifice for that, for that little bit amount of time.
[00:23:36] Sell some stuff.
[00:23:38] What else? Get rid of the subscriptions, subscriptions services that you don't necessarily need.
[00:23:44] Figure out. I mean it's like all those subscriptions and all the, all the side, all, all the other stuff aside like the hobbies and stuff. Like when you're getting out of debt, like really just working and coming home, Working and coming home. You don't have time for that stuff. You don't have time for it.
[00:24:02] I mean you don't have time to watch a movie because you're, you're either, you know, working or you're going home to sleep and find out like, find out ways to find out ways to entertain yourself to where you don't need a subscription service.
[00:24:20] Buy DVD, go old school. Buy DVDs. You know what I mean? That's what we did. We had, instead of dvd we had a TV that had a VHS and we would go to the dollar store, not the dollar. We would go to half price books and buy VHS tapes for a dollar.
[00:24:36] That was crazy. You know, I mean, do stuff like that.
[00:24:40] What else can I share?
[00:24:45] Yeah, that, that's it, you guys. If there's anything else that you like for me to share on as far as this, that for debt, free journey for yourself or the experiences that me and my wife went through and getting out of debt I. I would. I would like to share that with you guys. If you have any suggestions or comments that I can share with you guys. But anyways, that's enough of my time. You guys. You guys. If you like this video, share it.
[00:25:13] Leave a comment.
[00:25:15] I'm out. See y' all later.
