Thirty-five years ago, the largest hamburger chain on earth started meals for kids. They added playgrounds to their restaurants. They made it fun for kids to come to eat.

Very early, kids learned to want to come back and eat at their restaurants. They may have trained you, too.

Recently, there are people that feel we should now blame » Read more…

Young people seem to be confusing assets and debt. Some are implementing potentially dangerous thoughts regarding credit as it relates to creating debt. While at a car wash the other day, a young man and I struck up a conversation about credit.

He was wondering if I knew » Read more…

The cash advance business is growing at enormous rates. You’ve seen these places popping up in all types of neighborhoods. These are relatively clean, well lit, innocent looking establishments. The new, improved breed of quick-cash ‘til payday operations look great on the outside. The personnel working in them are dressed professionally. But the usury style of business is the same as it’s always been.

Typically, they are offering very short-term loans to people, already in debt, who find themselves in a bind. Since they require no credit check, it can be a convenient way for » Read more…

Certain laws exist which we can accept or reject. When we choose to accept these laws, the knowledge and use of the law works to our benefit. When we aren’t aware or ignore the existence of the laws, it’s like fighting the current of a river in a boat.

Take Isaac Newton and his observance of gravity. Here is old Newton sitting under a tree. An apple falls onto his head. He observes gravity. He thinks and ponders this phenomenon, writes about » Read more…

Q. We have $12,000 in our “emergency fund” and about that much in high interest credit card debt. Should we pay off the credit cards gradually? Should we use the cash and pay the debt off? My spouse insists we should consider a home equity to pay off the card debt in » Read more…

One reason, our debt is growing so quickly, is we moved from the service based society to a service and information and communication based society. The computer has made information and knowledge move so much faster than it did fifty years ago. The people of the world want information.

Things are moving so quickly, in our efforts to keep pace, we’re not watching what’s really happening to us financially. We are just not watching.

The speed of technology and information is resulting » Read more…

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak with a group of young couples and I discovered something I’d suspected but never really knew to be true.

During that evening we discussed at length the importance of using guidelines for their necessary expenses. We’d been talking about how to eventually get to living debt-free. Over half the room hadn’t heard about housing expense being no more than twenty-five percent of your take home pay. They were simply unaware.

As explained in length on page eighty-eight of No Balance Due, you can choose to use the old twenty-five percent number or not. I’ve tried it both ways. Life simply goes easier when we haven’t spent over the twenty-five percent guideline.

It’s been around for centuries. And that’s the point. Even though television and sometimes even the lenders tell us we could spend more, it’s best not to.

After this talk, the nicest young man came up to speak with me. He announced that he knew his grand-parents owned their home free of debt during their retirement. He also stated he thought his parents would probably be able to pay for their home by the time they retired.

He emphatically professed that his generation wasn’t going to be able to do that. He said I wasn’t aware of the reality of how life is for young families in America economy.

After a few minutes of visiting with him we discovered a few things he hadn’t remembered too well. I asked him about what size home he’d grown up in. He said he thought it was about a 1200 square foot home with three small bedrooms and one and one-half bathrooms.

He also remembered that his mom cooked on an oven-stove combo and they had an older model refrigerator. Next he volunteered that their wasn’t much counter space to prepare meals and they used the stove top to do a lot of that.

I next asked him what size home he and his family were in. He proudly told me they were in a twenty-nine hundred square foot, four bedroom home with a thirty-five thousand dollar custom built kitchen that they are only using three or four times a week because they are dining out the rest of the time.

All of a sudden it hit him. I didn’t say much. I could see his expressions and his tone changed. He said they’d been so busy creating their dream life-style they were putting themselves into their own debt troubles. All of a sudden he realized it had taken his parents over a quarter century to have the nice home and appliances and vehicles they have now.

He said he’d simply forgotten. I told him there are always less expensive alternatives in any given school district for their children. He admitted they are so busy keeping up with everybody else, they simply weren’t thinking about their future.

It doesn’t matter what everybody else does. My mother used to tell me something your’s may have told you. Just because so and so jumps off a cliff, does that mean you have to do it too?

Housing expense should not exceed twenty-five percent of your take home pay. One weeks pay for housing. That’s the way my father-in-law told his children. The other weeks are for you to live. Check out the first part of Chapter eight of No Balance Due.

We were on a trip with some friends a few years ago when the subject of budgets, consumer debt and credit cards came up. We talked about this for hours.

We stopped for lunch and as we were paying, my friend Mike asked me about paying for lunch with a credit card. We had no idea the subject of credit cards was to take the twist it did.

A Quick Tip: Click inside the screen below.

Mike said, he and his wife Lee Anne, had accidentally realized something about their credit cards » Read more…

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 » Read more…

During the course of running some errands a few days ago, we ran into some friends, Ken & Patti, and took some time to have lunch. Knowing my passion is this personal debt issue, a story about these people’s daughter and son-in-law came up.

Apparently this young couple had come over to our friends’ house to watch the Super Bowl game. During the course of the evening the young couple announced that they had eliminated all of their debt.

As the story unfolded, they had taken a home equity loan and » Read more…