Adopting the following concepts will help you get on the fast track to being debt free.

One. Get around people that have no debt. Folks that are debt free usually confronted a lot of debt in their life experience. They can help you with ideas to develop a plan of your own. They had to conquer the same issues you are presently facing.

Two. The sooner you discover, using cash instead of plastic, the sooner you will experience lower debt. As youngsters, we all learned very early, that cash was our form of exchange when we wanted to buy things. We also discovered early, if we didn’t have any cash, the things we wanted to buy couldn’t be had.

Then we came into adulthood. We grew into high finance. We got plastic money. We realized this plastic has a unique feature to it. It represented an unlimited supply of the cash we’d been using up to this point. We could buy ourselves more of the things we wanted, and we could pay for it a little at a time. That’s really cool.

Realizing, you’ll spend less by moving back to cash for awhile, will transform the way you think of credit and debit cards. You’ll discover that purchases you’ve been making will cease happening. I can’t explain how or why it works, but it does work.

Three. Stay away from consolidation and home equity loans. These help your situation in the short run. Long term they work against you. If your house and my house and our neighbors house are rising in value, we can safely assume all the houses around the world are rising in value.

If all the houses are rising in value, a major factor to consider is that inflation is at work. I call it the devaluation of the dollar. This means if we sell our house ten years from today, for double what it originally cost, it will probably cost us double to buy our new house in another neighborhood, than it would have cost us ten years ago. That’s inflation at work.

Identifying this fact will help you realize when you borrow your home equity, you are simply taking all or part of the ownership you have out of your house. You are defeating the very reasons to buy a house in the first place. We buy a house and pay for it over time, so eventually in the future we can live there without paying rent.

Repeatedly liquidating our ownership out of the house simply means, we’ll be paying rent (mortgage payments) for a much longer period of time. Overcoming this habit avoids paying the lender to borrow the money to occupy your house.

This will convert the money you would have spent on interest into principal. When we reconsider just what we’re doing, we start to easily increase our assets and reduce our debt.

These principles are solutions to Being In Debt Up To Your Eyeballs. Over fifty more are available in the popular personal finance book No Balance Due. Give yourself the greatest gift you can — a life free of debt. Embrace these simple financial strategies? Life is short. Begin now.

It’s available at finer bookstores, online bookstores such as Amazon or from our bookstore.