Welcome to my new blog, Roe Intense.
Our trip down the Total Money Makeover path took a turn for the serious in January.
It didn't START then. Nope. We'd made a goal over a year ago to be debt-free by 30. We also made a goal to have a house with chickens by 35.
Before January, we knew the Makeover was a good idea. After January, we wrote it on the fleshy tables of our hearts and started running. Before January, we were trying to increase our income, to be sure. But the intensity wasn't there!
The #1 reason why we got into gear in January was because we became a whole new level of SICK of being in debt. The #2 reason hands-down was the radio program. Thanks to those two things, we truly tasted "Gazelle Intensity." To quote daveramsey.com:
So what exactly is gazelle intensity?
Dave coined the term after reading Proverbs 6:4–5, which says, “Give no sleep to your eyes, nor slumber to your eyelids. Deliver yourself like a gazelle from the hand of the hunter, and like a bird from the hand of the fowler.”
In other words, when you’ve gone into debt, when you’ve co-signed on a loan (the topic of Proverbs 6:4–5), when you’re in over your head with money problems, you need to work as hard to get out of debt as a gazelle works to run from a cheetah.
This is why I chose Roe Intensity as the title of this blog. We typically read the old King James Version of the same Bible, and "roe" is used instead of "gazelle". The idea is the same:
GET OUT OF DEBT.
Hats off to my wife. She's the one that started listening earlier this year. I'd come home from work and she would tell me these stories about couples that would pay off crazy amounts of money like $50,000 in 18 months making $40 a week and collecting pop cans.
Ok, I exaggerated that one.
But the numbers were crazy! They sounded impossible! But here were these people SCREAMING that they were debt free after climbing their own mountains of money! We started to get fired up. We did our own math, ran some numbers...
...and resigned ourselves to get out of debt NEVER, and especially not before turning 31.
"Well, why, RI, did you double your efforts if you felt that discouraged?"
Sacrifice. That was the kicker.
We thought we were sacrificing. Nope. We were wrong. We didn’t need everything we were spending money on.
That’s what changed in January. We decided to sacrifice. We whittled away at what we thought were needs, and dedicated ourselves to a cash-envelope system.
A funny thing happened. After we went through the discomfort, pain and annoyance of trimming some of that off, we learned that, given current levels of income, we would be out of debt by May 2016, while still 30 years old!
Now remember, I said I was working two jobs. Well, in August, part-time became full-time, so job #2 went away. I remedied that by doing something I always thought was a cliche Dave Ramsey said to make a point: I got a job delivering pizzas.
Here's the story of a real-life situation where a man did this exact thing: got his family out of debt delivering pizzas.
Today was my first day. I made about $19 in tips. Beware, o mighty debts. This roe just bolted.
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