It’s been a pretty amazing last 9 days and an awesome awesome start to February which for most is the worst time of year because of the “January Blue’s”.  It’s the time when all the bills from Christmas come in and people just have no idea where to start on how to pay off all these bills.  This year for us we took coaching and mentorship and because of that there are no blue’s in the Guthrie household this January!

So in the last week and a half since I mentioned that we paid off $22,000 (actually $26,500 when I include both the MasterCard and Visa) people all over have been asking us how we did it? How did you pay off that kind of debt in such a short time?  I tell them it was the help of some amazing coaches by listening to what they had to say, reading some suggested books, streamlining our life and lastly making smarter decisions.  Before all of that however it started with association and getting around like minded people who want similar things in life.  As I’ve said before you are a product of books you read and the people you associate with.  I took that to heart and with that paid off $26,500 in under three months.  Am I different then you? Nope.  I have two arms, two legs and put my pants on the same way you do.  Now I know your wanting to know “well that’s nice Shaun, but how exactly did you do it”, well I’ll tell you.

• First and foremost if you want to get out of debt you need to talk to someone who has, and not just someone who said “Oh yeah I paid off some debt”. Well what does that mean? Did you pay off a few hundred dollars?  A few thousand?  Go find someone who will actually tell you how much debt they had so it’s tangible to you, so you can say to yourself if they can pay of $x amount then I can too.  So we did just that and sat down with an amazing woman, Christine Shewchuk who shared her insight and coached us in making some suggestions on smarter decisions with our money.  Now notice how I said “suggestions”, with World Wide Dreambuilders one of our cardinal rules is “Don’t mess with any one’s money” and Christine made sure she was giving us suggestions.  Ultimately it’s our decision on what we do with it and we were sick and tired of doing the same thing going round and round not making any headway.
• Second we were recommended to read “The Richest Man in Babylon”.  I won’t go into much detail about the highlights of it that we took out of it was if you want to get out of debt, streamline your life to live off 70% of your income.  The other 30% should go to debt/savings.  So we split it up into 20% towards debt and 10% to savings.  With this we setup a budget and have actually stuck to it.  It’s amazing when you really want to acomplish something and you make changes necessary to achieve that.
• Lastly we took a good hard look at what investments we had and compared them to all our debt to see just how much we were “making” in our investments.  Turns the majority of are actually LOSING money in our investments compared to our debt.  Think about it, do your investments return you 19.5% each month?  Do they even make you 19.5% in one year?  Some might but most won’t.  And when you compare $22,000 on our Visa at 19.5% interest to some of our investments we were loosing money and not even getting ahead.  So with some advise we took some of our investments out and put them towards the debt.  It just made sense.  To be honest I would have NEVER thought to do that because we are all taught that we need to put that money away to invest and not touch it until we retire.  If we didn’t do this we’d still be swimming trying to pay off our credit card with little payments sometimes just over minimum and not really affecting the principal.  A vicious cycle that would have taken a LONG time to end.

As you can see it wasn’t anything hard.  We first got around some amazing people that helped us break the mental block of just ignoring debt and paying the minimum or just being careless with debt and not taking it serious.  We then did the three steps above and really committed our-self to these things.  What did we get in return?  $26,000 less debt that’s what!  We are not done either, so don’t get me wrong we are not debt free, however we will be close to it by the end of this year (aside from the mortgage) and that day will be a HUGE celebration for sure!

Part of our goal is to impact people and I think this is a good way to start.  We’ve impacted more people then we realize so we’ve been told as our message has been forwarded out by the likes of Brad Duncan, Leslie Wolgamont and others.  With that we’ve partially achieved our goal and we will continue to be leaders and teach other people the things we’ve done to be successful.  We are in the business of duplication and we only want the best for people.

So can you do what we did?

Start being real about your debt, take ownership and do something about it!