Why is a goal important?

If you’re like most people you establish your goals of paying off all your debts and place the piece of paper in your desk and proceed to forget all about it until the end of the year.

Than, at the end of the year, you either find your old goal sheet and copy it for the next year or go by memory and start over again.

Here’s the biggest problem with goals. We tend to make them for the entire year and never keep up with our progress.

Here’s a simple strategy to figure your goals, keep up with your goals, and motivate yourself to exceed your expectations (goals). The goal, of course, of getting out of debt.

First and foremost is the idea of making your goals monthly, not yearly. Most of us can project out what we’re going to make over the course of a month. For a few of you out there you might want to do this weekly.

Don't even think about yearly. Think in terms of daily. Everyday you're putting together $15 (and if you have to get the money order daily!). At the end of the week you've got $105 dollars toward your credit card bill.

I’m going to assume you’ve read some of my previous posts on strategies for paying off your credit cards early. If not, here’s a quick reminder of my advice. Take the credit card with the least amount owed. Pay minimum payments on all the rest. A previous post talked about how to find $15 dollars a day extra just based on what you’re currently spending money on. I recommend using the extra $15 dollars a day for the extra payment to your credit card.

Measure your goal daily and weekly. Let’s say your credit card balance is $1000 thousand dollars. Make four extra copies of your monthly bill. No less than once a week get a money order and mail one of those copies of your bill. If you’re using my 15 dollar a day strategy you’ll pay an extra $105 toward your credit card every week.

When you get the next month’s bill do the same thing (make atleast 4 copies of the bill). You’ll either have paid off the card in two months or two months and a week or so. There’s a lot of motivation watching your credit card balance go down weekly. It’s pretty exciting.

Use a wipe off type board and hang it over your desk to check your progress. Once you’ve eliminated your first credit card celebrate! Get a latte, or candy bar. Go ahead an blow $15 bucks. The next day start on the next bill.

Before you know it one year will have gone by and you’ll have paid off over $5000 dollars in credit card bills! The average American has between $7000 and $9000 in credit cards. Do this for less than 24 months and you’ll immediately see and feel the difference as your credit card debt is wiped out!

You’ll literally eliminate all of your credit cards in weeks not years!

Not only will your health improve, but your attitude will be fantastic and the stress level will go down. Plus, you and your spouse will feel even freer.

To your success!

David…

Attitude equals Gratitude

For Christmas this year I gave each member of the family a journal with a set of instructions. To paraphrase I asked the family to write down 50 things they were grateful for. And over the course of the next few days after Christmas I said to add to the grateful journal each day until you get to 100.

The reason is pretty simple. We live in a negative environment, a negative world, negative television, and half the folks surrounding us are negative.

For the most part we don’t really appreciate what we have we just focus on what we don’t have. We don’t have enough money, the new car, the better job, the promotion, the television, and home.

We tend to focus on what we don’t have and not what we do have already. It’s an easy thing to forget about. It’s easy to forget we have more than most and probably more than we deserve.

Try it. Get a pad and pen, or an official journal for a few bucks and start writing all those things that you do have and that you do appreciate. Start with your spouse, kids, parents, friends, and other relatives.

Continue with your home, and car, and stuff that fills your closet. Finally, remember your health and job and ability to provide for yourself and family.

Gratitude adds to your upbeat positive attitude. It’ll make you feel better and really appreciate what you have. The more grate you have for what you've got the better your attituthetter you'll feel. You'll find its a great stress reliever.

David...

David…

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…