Eliminating Debt

Today I want to give you a couple simple tips for helping you eliminate your debt.

But first, let me ask you a question. The question is, how do you as a 401k or 403b participant become a 401k superhero to your future self?

That is the question, and these videos will give you the answers. Hey, I’m Jonathon Schultheiss and welcome to the Becoming a 401k superhero videos.

Part of my mission is to help you become a 401k superhero to your future self. And one way to do that is to help you with your personal finances so that you can save enough for a comfortable retirement.

I want to share a story with you. I did a presentation for a company on my book Focused and the company bought copies for each of their employees.

When I returned six months later to do an enrollment meeting, one of the employees filled out the enrollment form and put 20% on the line for percentage of their salary they wanted to save for retirement.

I was taken back a little bit thinking that maybe he really wanted to save $20 instead of 20%. There is a big difference in $20 and 20% of your salary. I thought I better confirm before this causes an issue.

The answer I got surprised me! The participant said, Jonathon, I listed to your presentation and I read your book. I applied those things to my finances and I now want to put 20% of my salary towards planning for retirement.

Wow! I was taken back and excited that my book was helping someone.

You see, the things that helped him most was two tips I give from my book about getting out of debt. Those are using the Debt Snowball and using 0% interest credit cards.

Now I can’t take credit for these strategies. They’ve been around for year and made popular by Dave Ramsey.

The debt snowball works like this. You list your debts in order of smallest to largest. You apply extra payments to the smallest debt until it is paid off. Then you take the extra payments plus the payment from that debt and apply it to the next smallest debt.

As you keep doing this, the amount that you are applying to the next debt gets bigger and bigger, that’s where the name snowball comes from.

The other tip is to use 0% interest credit cards. You may not realize it, but the interest you pay on credit cards is sometime extremely high. Especially if you’ve ever missed a payment.

That high interest rate may be keeping you stuck. If you move your balance to a card with a 0% rate, you would be able to apply the whole payment to the balance helping you pay off the debt even faster.

I hope these tips have been helpful. I’ve even created a debt snowball chart that you can use to help you. You can click on the link above or you can go over to TheFocusedBook.com/resources and you can download a free copy of the snowball chart.