I've talked to a number of people since I first posted my take on one of the many schemes to eliminate debt in a relatively short time frame. Some are doing it, while others, for whatever reason, haven't been able to motivate themselves to do it just yet.
An old friend and I have been talking a lot about debt elimination these past few weeks. With any luck, both of us will be completely debt-free by age 45 at the very most, and probably sooner.
The trick is to dump as much money as possible into debt retirement. As recently as November, the interest on my Honda Civic was costing me $1.40 a day. Think what you could do with that $540 a year you're paying in needless interest.
The challenge is finding the money to use to retire debt.
I've been seeing more and more advertisements for paid survey sites. And the promises keep getting more and more ridiculous.
I think it's a scam. You can make a little bit of spending money filling out surveys, but don't let anyone hoodwink you into thinking you'll get rich. Look at it as a way to spend a couple of hours a week to make a little bit of extra money, and nothing more, and you stand to do OK.
Thanks to some circumstances where somebody knew somebody who knew somebody, I found myself tonight at a seminar where John Cummuta was speaking. He's the guy who you may have heard on the radio hawking a system called Transforming Your Debt into Wealth.
Hopefully I won't get into too much trouble by presenting the simplified version of his plan.
As I was walking through the paint section of my local hardware store, I spied a product on the shelves that claimed to work miracles. It was called Howard Restorafinish. The can shows a picture of someone wiping a door or tabletop that has scratches, water marks, and other nastiness and making it look brand new.
Too good to be true? Probably. But it was about five bucks. So I bought a can.
The topic at lunch at work turned to saving money around the house earlier this week, largely because one of my coworkers suddenly found himself with full responsibility for his two pre-teen nieces. The coworkers who are parents started talking about the best places to get good used clothes, the best places to get food cheap, and other stuff. Not being a parent, I just listened. I'm not at that stage in life.
I'm in a different stage of life, still a relatively new homeowner. Yesterday I paid a grand total of $5 for an ironing board and a stepladder, two things I've been surviving without. I'm about ready to quit going to the hardware store and to Kmart.
I saw someone out scrounging for aluminum cans recently. I remember my Dad telling me once that as he drove to one of the many remote hospitals in southern Missouri that he used to cover, he got used to seeing a couple on a riding lawnmower, driving along the shoulder of the road, picking up cans. He commented that he didn't realize aluminum was worth enough to make that worthwhile.
Being a notorious cheapskate--so much so that the indigenous people of the Himalayas have a folk song about me--I decided to find out.
I'm a notorious tightwad, so I just did something today that's guaranteed to save me pennies per month: I insulated my electrical outlets and light switch outlets on my outside walls with some foam inserts I found at the local closeout store.
Money is a controversial topic in Christian circles. On the one hand you've got people who say money is the root of all evil. The other extreme says if you do the right things, God will reward you with health and wealth and who knows what else.
I shredded a tire on my 2000 Dodge Neon this morning. That's one way to keep me from getting to church on Sunday. What makes things much worse is that I won't have the car past the end of June, so my last few miles on that car are expensive ones.
