Debt-Free Forever by Gail Vaz-Oxlade (best english books to read for beginners txt) 📗

live in debt. You can change your life. But you have to really want to. It will be hard. But if you have the gumption, you can do it. I know you can.

The first thing you have to do is take all your credit cards but one (or at most two) and cut them up. Include your department store cards. And unless you’re getting a discount on gas, include your gas cards too.

Remember, cutting up your cards does not cancel your account. It simply removes the ability to use the card—and the temptation to spend money you don’t have.

Next, take the credit card you’ve kept and put it somewhere hard to reach—freeze it, bury it in the fish tank, throw it behind the refrigerator. Now you’re on your way.

GAIL’S TIPS

The best way to use credit cards to your advantage is to use a card with the bells and whistles you like to pay for the necessities of your life, everything from groceries and gas. When you charge something, transfer the same amount of money you spent into a savings account set up explicitly for paying off the card. Come the due date, you can use the money you transferred into your Credit Card Account to pay off the card in full. There ya go: you’ve used and paid off your credit, added to your credit history, and stayed in the black. What a concept!

You’ll have to make a budget, create a debt repayment plan, and rebuild your credit history (if you’ve made it messy). And you should negotiate with your creditors to either consolidate your debt at a lower cost or reduce the amount of interest you’re paying on your various forms of credit.

Most important, you have to stop shopping. Make a promise to yourself that you won’t buy another unessential thing until you’re out of debt. If you must shop, it’s got to be a bargain. I don’t want to hear the yada yada on quality versus price. Bargain shopping doesn’t mean buying crap. It means buying quality at the best price going. And it means only buying what you need.

As much as you might think you could never survive without that coffee in the morning or that glass of wine in the evening, I’m here to tell you that you can. If you’ve got so much as a dollar of debt, you’ve got to put the brakes on the “nice to haves” until you’re out of the hole. Debt-freedom brings its own intoxication. There’s nothing like the feeling of being free and clear of all financial obligations. Take a sip. It’s a taste to which you’ll enjoy becoming addicted. Cin cin!

PART THREE

CHANGE YOUR HABITS

6

MAKE MORE MONEY

You’ve done up a budget. You’ve created a debt repayment plan. You’ve set some goals for what you want to achieve. All you need now is money. It doesn’t matter how much you trim, how much you plan, how much you tweak, there’s just not enough moolah to go around. Maybe you just don’t make enough money.

If you are struggling to make ends meet and are working a 37.5-hour workweek, perhaps you’re just not working hard enough. And if you’re digging a helluva hole using credit to fill the gaps in your budget, maybe it’s time to look at what you can do to make more money!

Some people don’t equate how hard they work with how much money they have. And so when I tell people they have to find a way to make more money, they balk. They are outraged that they’ll need to spend more time with their noses to the grindstone.

Now, I’m not one for exchanging all of one’s life energy for money or stuff. Quite the contrary. But if you aren’t making it to the end of the month before you get to the end of the money, and you’ve already trimmed your expenses to the bare bone, the only solution left is to make more money.

What’s so wrong with hard work anyway? When did it become unnecessary to make enough money—no matter how hard you had to work—to keep the home fires burning? When we got our grubby little hands on credit and decided we could spend money we hadn’t yet earned instead of simply earning the money we needed now, that’s when.

There are lots of people who work hard and still have it tough: people who are dealing with unemployment or a significant change in the economy; people who have struggled through a divorce or widowhood and are finding it difficult to make ends meet; people who have become disabled or are living on a limited fixed income. I’m not talking about those people.

I’m talking to all the lazy doofuses out there who think that just because they put in their 7.5 hours today, they’ve done as much as should be expected. Really? You don’t have enough money to make sure your kids are safe, but you worked hard enough today? Sorry, I’m not buying it.

I live in a rural area where there’s no such thing as 9 to 5. Most of the people who live around me—regular working Joes and Janes—routinely put in a 12-hour day. That leaves six for family and six for sleep. Why do they do it? Because farmers don’t get to clock out. Because even those who have viable farming operations have at least one member of the family with a full-time job on top of the farming to make it all hang together. Because independence and self-sufficiency are still valued, and people do whatever they must to make the money they need to have the lives they want.

The same is true for people who rise to the top of the executive ladder or are successfully self-employed. Successful executives and entrepreneurs don’t get to work a half-week; their workweek is often 70 hours. If they’re going to make their businesses fly, they’ve got to bust their