Hey Everybody! Welcome to the dream crushing that podcast. I am your host, Dustin, and this is our very first podcast episode. I’m super excited about it. I know there’s a lot of you out there who love listening to podcasts, so hopefully this is another worthy addition to the the line-up that you’ve already got. Here at Dream Crushing Debt, the conversation is about money, it’s about budgeting, it’s about getting out of debt and all the emotional rollercoasters and the struggles and everything that goes into that. Getting out of debt is really tough.
It was really tough for me and it took nearly a year for me to figure it out, change my thought process is my mindset and really dive in a year, a year of struggling a year of trying to reconcile.
Can I really do this?
And during that year, I read a lot of Dave Ramsey, I listen to his podcast I listen to his other stuff that he has, EntreLeadership and I loved it. We all love Dave Ramsey, but Dave Ramsey, I think has a more generalized a more broad approach to getting out of debt.
He’s not down in the trenches for day-to-day finances or week-to-week finances, and that is truly where I found my success in budgeting, and paying off all of my student loans.
So, I’m not your Dave Ramsey that’s not gonna be my focus, I’m not going to regurgitate what Dave Ramsey talks about.
Well, it has inspired a lot of what I’ve done and what I still do. I’m not going to share it with you what he teaches.
I wanna talk to you about how I got out of debt, how I approach a day-to-day budget or a week-to-week budget so that at the end of the month, I am under budget, I have extra money in my paycheck, that I can put towards my debt or my other financial savings goals that I have. Because let me tell you, having paid off all of my student loans in less then three years, but I just… Over two, I have been able to do wonders with my financial stability.
I am shocked every day I look back and I say, “Wow I have this much in the bank, oh my goodness, I am making leaps and bounds of progress now that I have learned how to budget and get out of debt and best of all, being debt-free, has allowed me to travel.
I love traveling. It’s like an addictive… I don’t know what you call it… it’s just you can’t get enough of it. It’s so insatiable that you see those travel deals come up and you… You could buy without even thinking about you’re like… Well, I can’t pass this up.
And being debt free having that extra money available every month allows me to do that.
And these are the things that I wanna talk about on this podcast. These are the things I wanna talk about what I’ve went through how I got through it and what I’m doing today to enjoy the debt-free life.
So, I’m not Dave Ramsey, I love what he teaches, but I’m not him.
I did it my way.
And I want to share with you my way because… it worked and I feel like it was different than anything else that I read online and that is what I think is important with all of this is getting out of debt, there is no one sure way to do it. You’re gonna find a lot of people out there talking about the same thing. How do you get out of debt? How do you create a budget? How can you do any of this? Right? There’s a lot of people talking about it. And what I learned in just creating my own budget, and plan to get out of debt was that you can take it all in, and then create your own take what it sounds great, take what makes sense and create your own budget and just go after it.
It’s easier said than done some days, I get that. Believe me, it took me 10 months almost a year to take what was easier said and then to actually do it. It was tough, it was really tough.
I think the hardest things for me to get out of debt, to create a budget, mostly, was to first analyze all the different things I spending money on. To create a list, essentially, of where my money was going every month.
That was really tough, but tougher still was to look at all of those things and say to myself, “You cannot spend money there, you don’t have to have a car wash pass, you don’t need to go buy new clothes just because they’re having a summer blow out sell, okay, you don’t have to have a really expensive car or you don’t need to go eat out at the Melting Pot once a month, because it sounds fun, you don’t have to get out every other night because you don’t wanna make dinner.” These are the things that I went through, initially I struggled with it a lot, basically to say, “Can I imagine my lifestyle changing like this? Can I imagine myself living a lifestyle like this? Sacrificing, saying, “No,” to all the things I’ve been doing, and then did I believe in myself to say that I could do it, that I could be successful at it.
It’s a tough… It was really tough. It was easy to say for myself. I can cancel that car wash pass or I’m not gonna eat out every other night, I’m gonna get out once a week, it was really easy to say that, but then once I started to imagine literally imagine myself living this new limited lifestyle, I guess, we’ll call it a limited way of living. sacrificing a lot of things.
Once I started to imagine myself doing that, I started to freak out, I didn’t want to, I was like, “No, no, no. I like the way things are now, at least that’s what I thought. I like the way things are now, and I think whole heartedly that’s why it took me almost a year to finally dive in and I dove in to getting out of debt to committing to a budget, I had created knowing 100% what I needed, to cut out after I lost my first job. Once I lost my first job, the weight of all of that debt just seemed oppressive. I couldn’t breathe it was so bad and the lifestyle that I thought I liked, the lifestyle that I thought was okay, that I could just keep living… I just, I just couldn’t take it anymore.
Was the value of that worth suffocating?
So kind of like going cold turkey, as they say, I gave it up. I gave it all up and dove head in, both feet, into getting out of it into the plan that I had put in together, put in place to pay off my debt. There was no going back, and knowing what I know now, I would not have done it any other way, except for the fact that I wish I wasn’t so stubborn and scared and afraid of living my budget. Living a new lifestyle so that I could have extra money every paycheck to put towards my loans until they were paid off. I wish I wasn’t afraid.
So as Dave Ramsey says, “we all have to go gazelle at some point and just get it done, and hopefully by learning and listening to the things that I have learned that I’ve been through, you can go gazelle sooner than later, maybe today or this week. I hope my hope for you is that you can go gazelle sooner than later, by learning from my mistakes, by overcoming your fears, because I learned how to overcome my fears.
Yes, we’re all unique. Yes, or situations are very different from one another, I get that, but the important thing is, and in this and podcast series that you’re going to listen to is that you are not alone, you’re not alone in any of this.
And that’s what I love, that is how I got through my struggles of getting out of debt is because I realized I was not the only one to sacrifice something, I was not the only one trying to get out of debt. You’re not alone in this, and you can do this. So welcome to the Dream Crushing Debt podcast, thank you for listening to our first episode and I hope you keep coming back for more, please subscribe to the podcast, please comment on it, let others know that we’re out here and that we’re talking about the struggles of getting out of debt and how to do it.
We’re talking about how to create a budget, and be successful at it. We’re talking about our financial freedom. So thank you again, I’m so thrilled to have this podcast and to have this conversation going so I’ll see you guys in the next episode.