Debt-Free Series: Establishing the Why

Welcome to my financial series. I’m SUPER excited to share about this and also thrilled to know that I have friends who when I shared about my debt-free success, they were interested in me blogging about this so thanks to the few of you who gave me this idea. Ultimately, my goals are to motivate and inspire you to decide to reach for financial freedom as well while letting you know what worked for me. I won’t get too into the weeds about the logistics of how to do it. That’s your part. I will lead you to the well where I got my water from, but I am by no means going to attempt to pour the water in your mouth. You wouldn’t even succeed if I did that.

I’m excited. Let’s get started and as always, talk to me. Let me know your thoughts, your feelings, I’d love to answer what ever questions you may have, etc.

Before anything and just like everything else in life that we do, you need to first establish your why. Why do you want financial freedom? Why do you want to be debt free? Why do you want to establish a solid and positive net worth? Why does this matter to you? Why should you commit to this?

My why was for several different reasons. My first why is because I wanted to break a family cycle. Now I don’t come from a family that is necessarily struggling and I’ve never been in a situation where we were dirt broke. I did however see a lot of my family members having to work very hard and at the end of the day not have much leftover to show for their hard work. Also when I was teaching and a few years in, I remember looking at my W-2 during tax season and seeing the amount of money I had made in a full year compared to the amount of money in my savings account and it hurt my feelings. Hurt my feelings not because teacher pay is so low, even though that is indeed a fact but that’s not what I’m here to address- anyone is able to smarter about their finances and more intentional regardless of how much you make or how much you don’t. But, it hurt me to see how irresponsible I was with my funds and how I was not being a good steward over the money that I was earning.

Another reason for my why is because I just simply don’t like monthly payments. I hate making payments. It’s annoying to me and also the more monthly payments I have to pay to so many different people, I have a fear that I’m going to forget to pay accidentally then have accounts end up in collections on top of a bunch of late fees tagged on which is more wasted money. The more I thought about paying off my credit accounts, I realized that if I just completely pay these accounts off sooner than later, then I will have less monthly payments that I’m responsible for making so boom, that solves that.

2020. The year 2020. Yes, you felt that right. That speaks VOLUMES! Just saying 2020. The big pandemic shut down was a very sobering and humbling moment for me. At my job, several people in my job position were laid off. A lay off can come at any point and you wouldn’t even see it coming. Waking up one morning to get on our Zoom call and realizing that several people weren’t there, then buzz went around that folks had been laid off, then hearing it confirmed from our leadership team really scared me. It made me immediately think about if my name was potentially included in the conversation of who would be cut. The reality is had I been laid off at that time, I would have been screwed and I mean screwed! I was still doing the Dave Ramsey Baby Steps and very actively still in Baby Step 2 meaning I had only $1,000 in my savings account and maybe $300 in my checking. That’s it. I would have been jobless with only $1,300 to my name while still owing a lot of money to a lot of different people. Even reflecting on this to write this is bringing back those same feelings that I had then. So another why for me became that I want to get financially to the place where God forbid I am let go from my job, I’m still going to be fine financially- that I could be laid off with grace versus getting laid off and spiraling possibly into a depression but then taking another job out of desperation instead of a job which I actually enjoy and want to work. (Disclaimer: I have no desire to be laid off. I love my job very much and would actually be sad if I were to lose it.)

Spiraling off of that why, I am now able to truly work for fun and because I want to. When I would think about how less stressful work would become when I wouldn’t need as much money as income just to get by, working became that much more appealing to me. I’m able to see the fun in my work and not only seeing my job as my means to pay everyone I owe money to. My pastor in Nashville used to always say, “Find a job that you love so much you forget you get paid to do it.” Well, that’s hard to do when you use that job as a way to get money just to pay Peter, Paul, Mary, and all of their cousins. When you don’t owe all of those people anything anymore, you can now actually work just because. That’s exciting to me.

My personal last why is I adopted the mindset that the money I make isn’t actually my money when I still owe so much to other people. Honestly and as morbid as this may sound, I would remind myself that God forbid I die today, these companies would be calling my family reminding them of how much money I owe them and whatever “estate” I left for my family they would take their cut first and leave my family with whatever remains which would likely be nothing. I don’t want to live with the idea that I’m working hard my entire life and then when I die, there will be nothing positive left behind from my work to my family. Nah. I want them to be able to benefit from my life when I’m gone. So again, I kept telling myself and continue to tell myself that my income isn’t actually my money when I owe so much to other people.

So what is your why? Why do you want to want to embark on this financial freedom journey? Your why should be so exciting to you that when you think about it, it drives you to want to change your behavior in order to accomplish the goal. If your why doesn’t do that, then it’s not good enough. I encourage you to do some research. Read some books. One book that helped me establish mine was Everyday Millionaires by Chris Hogan. This book really changed my perspective on who is a millionaire but also changed my thoughts on what it takes to become one. In all honesty, it wasn’t the best read ever. I did get irritated a few times at how it was written but it did cause me to think differently and made me want to join the ranks. It also did give tangible, realistic things that I could and should be doing to achieve that status. It reiterated time and time again those things which was part of what irritated me, but it did help. The Dave Ramsey Baby Steps was the basis of my journey. My boss also did and does such an amazing job encouraging us to put the work in to establish and maintain a positive net worth so that’s also a resource that I used to support my commitment.

So your homework is to establish your why. Do some research, learn of other people’s stories, then get yourself really pumped up and excited to create your own. On the next post, I will get more specific into what I did. Then I’ll write about what got me through. Lastly, I think, I’ll discuss community. Community is big in this journey. Having the right people involved with you is such a beautiful thing while having the wrong people can be so detrimental. So we’ll talk about that. So again, establish your why and make sure it makes you excited. Otherwise, you won’t last.