How to Take Your Goal of "Debt-Free" into action

Let’s face it the goal is to be debt free. The question is how do you do it? How do you make yourself become debt-free? How do you start?

Well, there’s a story I heard years ago and I can’t even remember much of the context but I did get the point. Here’s my version of the story.

Two brothers inherited a Kingdom. The younger brother knowing his older brother well developed a plan to get the whole Kingdom not just half.

He began to order wonderful tasting dishes for his brother to eat. Than he had a mansion built just for his brother. He took the front door off the hinges of the mansion and told his brother if you can walk out of the mansion I’ll give up my half of the Kingdom and you can have it all.

If, on the other hand, you cannot get out the front door of the mansion I, the Younger Brother, will take the Kingdom for myself.

Well, the food kept coming. Day after day, hour after hour the food kept coming. Delicious food, wonderful food, lots and lots of food was served to the Older Brother.

Before the Older Brother knew it he could not fit through the front door of the mansion his younger brother had built for him.

You’ve heard me say it before and I’ll say it again. If you want to get through the front door or out of the ditch you’ve dug you must first stop eating the food or stop digging the ditch you are stuck in.

There’s another saying that goes like this: How do you eat an elephant?

There’s another saying that goes like this: How do you lose 50 pounds?

Here’s the answer to the above and the secret to becoming debt free. You lose 50 pounds by losing an ounce at a time. You eat an elephant one bite at a time.

What’s the moral of the story? If the goal is to be debt free you must tackle the goal much like eating an elephant or being in a ditch. You eat an elephant one bite at a time, and you get out of a ditch by first “stopping the digging”.

Your goal is to be debt free. Begin by taking baby steps when approaching the goal. Begin by taking on bite-sized pieces of the debt. Begin by picking one bill and focusing all of your energy on that one bill.

Here’s a real world example you can use to get out of debt now. Let’s suppose you have a credit card bill that you want to pay off. You begin by focusing all of your energy on the credit card? Use my $15 dollar a day strategy and begin sending those extra dollars toward that credit card bill (see my $15 dollar a day strategy in From Debt To Cash, the kit).

Here’s a quick explanation of the strategy to pay off your card. The next time you receive your credit card statement make 7 copies. Take $15 you saved today and purchase a money order and send in one of those copies of statements you made earlier.

Tomorrow, do it again. Take the $15 dollars you saved and purchase another money order and send the copy of your credit card bill. Repeat this process 7 times.

Let’s review what we’ve been doing. We’re tackling a credit card problem by sending in small bite-sized payments. Did you know that in a month you’ll have paid $450 toward that card? If that’s what you owed you now have one less credit card.

Now repeat the process. Make copies of the next credit card you want to pay off and work on it one bite at a time.

Seven days of $15 dollars equals $105 (one hundred and five dollars). If you owed a thousand dollars you’d pay it off in just 66 days.

That, my friend, is how you eat an elephant. That, my friend, is how you pay off all of your debts. That, my friend, is how you achieve your goal From Debt to Cash on bite at a time.

David…