32. GREATEST HITS Becoming Debt-Free

Imagine a life without the burden of debt hanging over your head.

A life where you can finally breathe freely, knowing that you are in control of your financial future. This is not just a dream; it can become your reality. But first, we need to address the problem at its core.

This week, I am sharing the replay of The First Steps to Becoming Debt-Free Webinar that I hosted in early July.

This is perfect for anyone who is tired of the constant stress and anxiety caused by mounting debt and unpaid bills. If you're losing sleep, worrying about how to tackle your bills and get your finances back on track, then I want to help you

It's time to break free from this vicious cycle and regain control of your life.

In the past few weeks I have had unexpected expenses come up in the form of:

-A large bathroom leak
-Broken air conditioner
-Mold remediation in my house
-A broken pool filter

But guess what? We didn't take out a loan or put any of this on a credit card. We understand that once you get into debt, it is so hard to get out of it so instead we made other tough choices (like selling our beloved Porsche 😥)

Listen in to hear how I paid off $42k in debt 5 years ago and how I've stayed out of debt since.

To Watch the Free Debt-Free Webinar instead, sign-up with your email here. 

Episode 32 Transcript

Hey, welcome to this week's podcast episode. This is a special release from a live webinar I did in the beginning of July, talking about concepts of becoming debt free, why you would want to become debt free. I share our own family story of becoming debt free, and I touch on a few ways to increase your income.

Decrease your debt and really start to live a life of financial wellness. So I hope you enjoy this episode. If you want to see the slides that I shared, you're going to have to head over to YouTube for that. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast. Talk soon, friends. This is To The Nines Podcast.

I am your host, Tiffany Wicks, a mom of seven who doesn't subscribe to the idea that you have to choose between your family and a career. I am on a mission to show the stay at home mom who has lost herself in child care and co compelling and the overworked corporate holdout who isn't finding joy and purpose in their career that They can work for themselves, making an impact and an income that serves your dream life.

After leaving my nursing career to raise our family, I needed more mental stimulation, but didn't want to give up the privilege of raising our legacy. I've been in network marketing now for five years. I know the strategy and mindset it takes to be successful and to live a life aligned with your values and your purpose.

Join me as I share my business tips, marketing mistakes, attitude shifts you need to space out some time for you, or Ditch your nine to five completely and start working for yourself. You have the power to change your life. Let's get started. This is just the beginning.

Hey, good afternoon. This is Tiffany Wicks. I am host of to the nines podcast, um, as well as a business mentor and business builder. What I am not is a financial advisor. I am just a regular person. With almost seven kids who went debt free about five years ago, after accumulating over 42, 000 in consumer debt, none of that was business debt.

I wasn't even in business. Um, it was about five and a half years ago or so wasn't even in business then. So all of it was consumer debt. The reason I put this class together was to help other people, a have hope that they could do it too, and B release themselves from the bondage of poverty. which is in itself debt.

So I'll go ahead and start this presentation by sharing my screen. So stand by for just a moment. Okay, here we go. All right. So here are five simple steps that I followed and that you could follow too, um, to becoming debt free. So debt is the worst of poverty by Thomas Fuller. So that one struck me because at the time we didn't feel like we were in poverty.

We really felt like, well, we have all this money and we did have a decent amount of money. My husband made over a hundred thousand dollars. I was primarily staying at home, um, taking care of the kids, homeschooling. So I wasn't bringing in any income at the time. And yet here we were going over our budget every single month.

And when I say budget, I am using that term incredibly loosely. It was just, Hey, we have this balance on our credit card. We don't have enough to pay for, um, Hey, don't spend money. I'm like, don't spend money on what? I have a family. I have kids. They need clothes and homeschool supplies and groceries. What am I not supposed to spend money on?

I'm not out buying Louis Vuitton bags and fingers full of diamond rings. I've had this one since we got married 17 and a half years ago. That's it. I've had no new jewelry. I haven't upgraded to the six carat bling bling on my left finger. None of that has happened. It feels like used to for years and years and years, we were just in this hamster wheel of providing exactly what we needed.

And that was it. There was no extra. There was no taking extravagant trips or even slightly nicer trips. There was no, well, I do have, you know, an extra 200 to buy a really nice pair of winter boots. Like, there wasn't any of that. It just felt like we were Always out of month before we were, I mean, always out of money before we were out of month.

And that was horrifying for me. And at one day it just pissed me off. I just got angry and I was like, I am done with this. We've got to figure out how to budget. We've got to figure out how to manage our money. We've got to get the heck out of debt and we have to figure out how to stay out of debt. So what did that possibly mean for us?

Well, we had over 42, 000 in debt. A lot of that was a car payment, which I think most Americans have car payments, um, and consumer debt. So it was just stuff we were putting on the credit card and granted they weren't extravagancies, but they were little things that added up a pack of bubbles for the kids here.

a board game there. I mean, those kind of things will just very quickly add up. Like, oh, well, I didn't want to plan ahead for our food, so we'll just go to Chick fil A. How many times do you have a Chick fil A charge on your credit card this month? If you live in the South, probably a lot. So it just kept adding up.

So finally we said enough, we've had it, and then I will tell you the end of our debt free story at the end of this presentation. Does your income matter? Because I have heard people say that, well, if you make more money, then of course you can be debt free. You make a lot of money. That's not entirely true, because how many very wealthy performers and entertainers have you heard of that are in massive debt because they don't know how to manage the money they have?

Okay, countless. So does your income actually matter when it comes to being debt free? The answer is a very complicated yes and no. How you can figure that out for yourself is once you eliminate every single non essential cost to your living, um, like your home, but this can also be negotiable because you might be living above your means right now, um, depending on its cost.

Your food, utilities, taxes, your phone is also negotiable. I know people are like, well, I have to have the latest and greatest of the iPhone. No, you don't. You can have the older version. I do have a newer version, not even the newest. I do have a newer version because I do have a business. I do work online.

I am an online creator. So for business purposes, I actually do need a good phone with a good camera and good capabilities. However, for the general public that doesn't do what I do, You can get by with a very basic phone that isn't costing you hundreds of dollars a month. All right, your transportation.

Again, it's probably not negotiable that you have transportation, but the type of transportation you have, 100 percent negotiable. So going back to our story, we had a truck payment. What we also had, now did we need that truck? We probably didn't need that particular truck, but what we also had was an asset.

Okay, we had a boat that was completely paid off because again, we were what I consider to be relatively debt averse. However, we somehow managed every single month to get ourselves back into a debt bubble that we couldn't seem to get out of. But we had this asset. Did we want to sell the boat when we did?

Of course not. We didn't. But we said we're tired of being in debt. We're tired of paying interest on this loan. We want to be free of it. So that's what we did. We sold our boat. We paid off our truck, and then we used the rest of that income from selling the boat, which was around 50k, um, to start applying towards credit card debt.

Alright, and we'll talk about how to apply it to credit card debt, um, in a few slides. Alright, and insurance is non negotiable. The type of insurance you have is absolutely negotiable. There are tons of resources that you can reference to decide, am I paying too much? Am, am I paying for way too Like your deductible, for instance, you can have a higher deductible insurance policy with lower payments.

You could look into HSAs. So there are a lot of ways that you can reduce the weight of insurance. And also, like, what is your risk to reward ratio when it comes to insurance? So it's a good thing to evaluate on that and not just have every single thing insured at the highest amount. All right, if you have taken out all of those expenses that are absolutely non negotiable, including your food cost, now food is our families, okay, because I have almost seven kids and two adults, food is legitimately our family's greatest cost every single month.

For us, that's non negotiable. I'm not gonna go buy Rice A Roni and Velveeta shells and cheese on sale just to save money. Okay, I'm gonna cut my budget somewhere else because having healthy food is non negotiable for us. We buy as much organic as we can. We purchase grass fed beef and fish that hasn't been full of mercury and farmed.

This may not be a priority for you, and that's okay. That happens to be our family's priority. So when you start creating your budget, which we'll talk about in the next few slides, you have to figure out for your family. What is non negotiable? Do you want to get by with boxed foods and more processed stuff to save money for a time?

And I will back up what I just said about the food when we were getting out of debt. We did back off on the nutrient density of the food that we were buying, and we created incredibly simple meals. Dave Ramsey, um, had a huge influence on our life, and he says, Rice and beans, beans and rice. We basically did rice and beans, beans and rice for months and months.

It took us about seven months total to completely pay off a little over 42, 000 in consumer debt by Practicing every single one of these principles that I'm talking about. And that was without me bringing an extra income from my business. Cause I hadn't started it yet. I will tell you later what prompted me to start a business.

Um, and that was to stay out of debt, but there was something very expensive that I thought was absolutely needed for our home that we weren't willing to go into debt for, which led me to starting a business. So I'll tell you about that soon. If you have removed all the essential stuff from your life and you still don't have enough money to pay for the essentials You absolutely have to earn more money.

And we'll go through later, things that you can do to earn more money. That's how you're going to decide, is your income sufficient? Alright, if you earn enough to provide for all of your basic living expenses, referenced above, if you're on YouTube, you can see the slideshow if you're listening on the podcast, um, food, utilities, taxes, phone, um, housing, then you have a budgeting problem and a self control problem.

You don't have an income problem. Moving on! The first step, number one, is you're going to collect all of your debts and expenses in one place, okay? You need to get your statements for all of your debts, car payments, student loans, credit cards, etc. Those are all your debts. Your regular bills that aren't debts, which are the things we talked about prior, your insurance, gas, electric, food, all the things, you have to have all of them consolidated.

Into one area. You can also get a free credit report, um, annualcreditreport. com will give it to you or there's lots of other places that you can get a free credit report to ensure that you don't have any debts that you're unaware of or that you forgot about when you were 19, um, that are now looking for you to garnish wages or, um, to continue to add on interest for the lack of payment.

You cannot be blind to the fact that you owe people money. And they are coming to get it. Um, I don't talk about filing bankruptcy in this course, because that is kind of the very last step that I would recommend anyone take. However, I will provide a resource at the end that you can read a little bit more about that if you'd like.

So, once you've gathered everything that you must pay for, you're also gonna gather all your income. Where am I earning money? Everywhere that you're earning money. If you have a side gig, add that in. If it is a, uh, fluctuating type of income, then you want to take your lowest average, and that will be the income that you provide for your gathering income step.

Okay. So get all that together. Don't turn a blind eye into it. You've got to, you've got to open up the statements. You've got to list everything from top to bottom. Don't worry about what costs more, what costs less. Just get it all on paper in one place. These are all the things that we absolutely have to pay for to live.

Category two, these are the regular or These are the debts. And then category three is what are some things that you spend money on that you would like to keep spending on. But these can be negotiable based off of how much you have extra if there is any extra. All right. So step number two, you're going to create a budget and determine what can be paid.

So you're going to create a budget and determine what can be paid each month. So again, you're going to start with the essentials to live. If you're living above your means, for example, if your mortgage or rent is greater than 28 percent of your monthly gross income, Then that's the money that you have to spend.

Then you need to decrease your standard of living. What that could mean is you need to move out of the place you're renting. Or you need to pull in a roommate, which will go back into your amount that you owe isn't really going down, but you're adding in an extra stream of income. You need to get a roommate, you need to sell, you need to move, you need to downgrade.

These are all different steps, and trust and believe, I know, like you're, uh, moving, it could be like the worst word ever. But if you're living above 28 percent of what you earn, You are living beyond your means. You have to move. Maybe you move back in with your parents for a time to get out underneath this rock of poverty that you're living in with debt accumulation.

Remember, this is a season. It will not last forever so long as you are consistent and disciplined. So now you need to start adding your debts to your expenses using one of the two different strategies that we've learned about. The first one is the avalanche method and the second is the snowball method.

Alright, so avalanche versus snowball. So avalanche talks about paying off your highest interest loans and debts first. All of this is said with the exception of your house. And we'll talk about house in a few minutes. Don't include your house into there. Okay. All right. So the problem with this is that your, well, the thought behind avalanche method is that you're going to start with your highest interest and then start paying that off.

The idea behind it is that you're going to save money in the long run. If you start paying off high interest stuff first, and then work your way down the second method, which is the one that we utilize is called the snowball method that works of paying off the accounts with the lowest balance, regardless of what the interest rate is.

First, and then you take any extra that you have throughout the month, even if it's just 50 and you're going to apply that plus the minimum payment you just made to your next bill with the next highest amount that's on it. So I'll use very simple numbers for for a demonstration here. Say you have a credit card bill that has 200 on it.

Your next credit card, if you have more than one credit card, that's another conversation. But say you have two credit cards. One has 200 balance on it. The other one has a 450 balance. Your payment on the 200 one is 20 bucks a month. You have 10 extra dollars, okay? Stick with the numbers here. I didn't make a slide for this, so I'm going to do this all in my head.

All right, so you are now at the end of paying off your 200 one. Your payment consistently, the lowest based off the interest, whatever that interest may have been, say it was 20 bucks, okay? That would have been a 10 percent interest, which is pretty low for a credit card. But nonetheless, you're going to take that 20 and then you're going to apply it to whatever your payment was for the 400 one.

If it was 10%, then that payment would have been 40. So now instead of making a 40 payment on that second credit card, you're now making a 60 payment on that credit card plus whatever extra you have after you've paid for everything you need to pay for during the month. So maybe you have an extra 50 bucks.

Okay. So now you've got 110 payment. Is that right? Something like that. 110 payment that you're making on this credit card. If you make that consistently, you'll have that paid off in five months. Two credit cards are now sliced and gone. And don't go back to them. I'll talk about credit cards more in a few minutes.

That's how you can pay off debt far more quickly and work up to those larger balances, um, faster and easier by using the snowball method. That was the method we used. You get to choose. All right, so step three is you have to manage your debt that are in collection. They're not going to call, they're not going to go away.

You have to call them, and you can oftentimes negotiate a lower payoff if you can discuss what options you have. Say, hey, I am in debt. I need to discuss how we can get you guys paid and how I can get out from underneath the rock of this debt. How can we work this out? There are payment plans they can often give you.

They'll often lower interest rates, student loans. It's a major form of debt right now that is looming right above people's heads, especially since the Supreme Court just said, no, um, the United States is not going to pay off your student debt. That's all on you. You guys, student loans will. Follow you all the way to the grave.

They will garnish paychecks. They will now start garnishing your social security wages. And granted, if you're young like me, you're not even thinking about social security, quite frankly. I don't even think it's going to be a thing by the time I'm old enough to utilize it, despite having paid into it.

Whole other topic. However, that debt will follow you all the way until you die and it will make your life miserable. So you can't ignore the student loan debts. You can't keep them in deferment forever. They're going to have to go into the whole list of debts. And if you are just joining us, feel free to watch the replay later, um, to go back to what you've already missed.

But welcome. You can't ignore it. So you're gonna have to start calling these people creditors and start negotiating how you're gonna get that paid off All right Step four is try to reduce the interest rates on the cards and the loans that you already have So the best way to do this is to ask you've got to call them If you're in good standing at least with a credit card company that you've been utilizing like you're making your minimum balances Trust me.

They love that because the higher the interest they're just making more income off of your inexplicable spending habits, they're probably willing to negotiate with you a little bit. So you can negotiate down that interest payment or say, look, I want to pay off this entire debt all at once. I can't pay it off right now.

What can we do? They might be able to work with you. A lot of them do. So look into debt consolidation. If you have got, wait, you've got an Amazon card over here. You've got a target credit card over here. You've got a cold credit card over here. You've got Amex, Visa and MasterCard. I mean, you have just got all the cards, all the credit, which you might want to look into as a debt consolidation.

Um, and then for houses and cars, possible refinancing. So debt consolidation is where you receive a loan. That will help you pay off all of those credit cards, close them all out, cut them up, throw them away, burn them, I don't care, just don't use them again. And then pay it all off at once. So you're only dealing with one loan now instead of seven or eight of them because that can get a little overwhelming when it comes to refinancing right now.

I'd say you'd probably be hard pressed to refinance your house and get a lower interest rate since, um, the feds moved the interest rates back up since supply was low and demand, uh, anyway, supply was low. Demand was high. They needed to increase interest rates. And our whole country is in massive debt, so don't take your financial advice from the United States of America.

They have got enough of problems on their own trying to just pay bills. They can't, actually. So, you need to consider, first off, with your home and your car, whether what you're living in and what you're driving is something you can actually afford. You guys, do you know how many people I know that make 40, 000 a year and they're driving cars that have payments of 250 a month?

You can't afford that car. You really can't. Older cars will work. You're going to have to sell that car, use the extra money, buy something that is older, still in good shape, and then you're gonna have to fix it when it breaks. Yes, that is another added cost that you'll put into your budget later on. But for now, you've really got to evaluate whether you can afford the car you're driving.

Most people can't, especially if you've got a loan on the car. I would argue that you can't afford to be driving the car that you're driving if you've got a loan on it. So, if you've got a loan on it, and your car costs 40, 000 a year, or costs 40, 000, and you're making 40, 000, guess what? You can't afford that car.

It doesn't matter if, well, I'm making the monthly payments. You're making the monthly payments, but you've got debt accumulating behind you from everything else that you're trying to live off of. You can't afford that car. If that car costs the exact same amount you're bringing home, you can't afford it.

So, consider that. You may need to sell your car, and then, we did it, we sold, well, we didn't sell a car, we sold, I'll explain that in a minute, actually, we will be selling a car to afford something we actually need, and didn't have the money for. So, stand by, I'm gonna get real honest about where we are financially, and what we're having to do right now.

So, maybe that will give you some hope, and be like, okay, this is a real person who's actually going through real financial stuff of her own. So evaluate whether you can actually afford it. The next is to consider a balance transfer. If you have three different cards and you have varying interest rates on all three of them, and one of them is a 22 percent, one of them is 18 percent, and then you've got one that's a 15 percent.

What makes the most sense is that you take these two at 18 and 22 and a half percent and try and get a balance transfer down to that 17 percent. Now you're only screwing with one card trying to pay it off, and the interest on the amount you're going to have is lower than you have on the other two.

Unless you have very low balances on those two other credit cards and you're like, yeah, I can wipe that out immediately, then feel free. All right, so then you need to work on, um, Consider the balance transfer and then move all those rates over to another card so that the higher interest is now on a lower interest card.

That's another consideration. All right, step five, you're going to create your budget, but don't use credit cards. Okay, this is going to be the hard part because it requires an incredible amount of discipline to spend only what you have. You have to pay to live. You don't want to be. living so that you can pay for all these extravagances that you cannot afford.

Then you need to add into the debts that you're working to eliminate. You have to do the math. Is there anything left over? If there's anything left over, those all get thrown at the debt. Later, you're going to start saving for an emergency fund. You're going to start saving for three to six months life expenses.

But if you don't have that, so let me reference back to Dave Ramsey. He will say always thousand dollars in your emergency fund, a thousand dollars. However, 1, 000 almost seems like not quite enough anymore for an emergency fund. So, if you're gonna follow the Dave Ramsey principle, then you're going to first have 1, 000 in an account saved up for an emergency.

Now, what classifies as an emergency? Well, going to see the latest Spider Man? No. Your air conditioner breaks? Definitely an emergency, but that's gonna be more than 1, 000. Not many people have 20 grand sitting around and I'm speaking from experience right now, my air conditioning just broke and we just paid 20, 000 for a brand new air conditioning unit, a brand new handler, and we have a bunch of mold in our house now.

So now we have to pay for all the remediation and renovations. This is going to be way more than 20, 000, and I'm going to tell you exactly how we're going to get that money without going into debt. So, everything you have to pay for, have to, okay? Let me reiterate that. Have to pay for to live. If you're curious about what that was, go back a few slides.

We listed it all. Then you have to add in the debts that you have to pay for. Once you've already negotiated terms, tried to get lower interest rate, debt consolidation, moved balances over, now you know the numbers you're working with. Okay, there's anything left over? That all gets applied if you're using the snowball principle, that will all get reapplied to your lowest balance card, debt, whatever it is, and then you're going to work your way up.

So non essentials, movies, restaurants. Target runs, non essential Amazon purchases, all the things that's like, oh my gosh, that's so easy to pay for, swipe to pay, done. You've got to eliminate that. You've got to practice self control. And that's going to be the hardest part is really evaluating. Do I need this to survive?

I know you really want that new Sephora lipstick. I know the color is perfect for summer. It's non essential. I can promise you, you can live without lipstick. All right. So I'm harping on that because I've done things like this. I've had classes like this before and people are like, no, but that's essential.

I'm like, no B, it's not essential at all. Like you have really got to reevaluate like your lifestyle. If you want to get out of debt, if you don't want to get out of debt, buy the raspberry cream lipstick. What the hell do I care? I'm living debt free. You're not. I'm winning. You're not. So choose where you want to be.

Doesn't hurt my feelings. All right, so back to the beginning here is do you need to increase your income? That is a huge question for a lot of people. So a lot of folks know you don't actually have to increase your income to pay off debt. But you do have to get control of your spending and to know what you're spending money on and then create a budget.

So the budget is going to quite literally be categories of things that you spend money on. Home, food, transportation, phone bill. If you have, once you have all of that stuff paid off, if you want to start saving for things and you have an emergency fund and you have three to six months living expenses, if you're on LinkedIn.

You know that LinkedIn is rampant right now with layoffs where people are like, Ah! I don't have any job. I don't have any money. I don't have any savings. How am I going to live? And it was like, probably should have planned for that a long time ago. However, they didn't. So now they're scrambling. The best time, by the way, to have a side gig is when you don't need a side gig.

So, three to six months living expenses will put some, at least a little bit of peace in your mind that We're provided for we can continue to live for three to six months, depending on and why the range right three to six. If you're a single person, three is probably fine. If you have a family, you're probably going to want to move closer to the six months and have that in a fund set aside that you don't touch.

It just lives there. And granted, I have heard people say, Well, what about you could be earning interest. It's not an investment, you guys. Investments are something completely different. You don't invest at all while you're in debt. It's No investing while you're in debt. I know, everyone's like, but the 401k!

You guys, I almost said F the 401k. But that's what's going through my head. You don't do a 401k, you don't get into the stock market, you don't do any of that until you are out of debt. Well, what about saving for, you know, this next, like, property or land that I want to buy? We have this extra money. If you're in debt, the answer's no.

You have to pay off debt first. Most people don't have to increase their income. They actually have plenty of income. They just have a spending and self discipline problem. So the real question, do you really need to increase your income? Well, if like I said earlier, you have already accounted for everything you absolutely have to live and you still don't make, make enough money.

Yes. Then you need to earn extra money. And we haven't even touched the things that you're putting on a credit card because if you're putting on a credit card, you're not buying it with your debit. You can't afford Okay. I'm going to say that again. Slower. If you are putting things on a credit card because you can't pay for it out of your debit, you can't afford it.

Now if you want to afford it and you can't afford it, Here are some great ways that you can earn extra money. So freelancing and if you're like, well, I don't know what if I have any skills. Well, that's a self monitoring thing. You're going to have to look inward and say, well, what can I do? So freelancing is an option.

Online tutoring is an option. There are tons of little kids that need help reading and their parents don't want to teach them. You guys, I homeschool my kids. That is one of the things I hate most, is teaching my kids how to read. I'm like, Tree! Tree! Junior, it's tree! I don't do that, but that's the way I feel sometimes.

Network marketing slash social selling is an excellent option. That's what I do. So delivery driving. Think Uber. Think Uber Eats. Think, um, Instacart. Dog walking. You know how many dog moms there are out there? They treat these four legged canines as if they're actual humans and would love for you to come over multiple times a day to walk their dogs for them.

That can easily be an extra 20 to 40 a month. You could babysit. I know if you've got your own regrets of your own, you're like, dear God, why would I want more children in my life? Well, it is a very simple way to make a lot of extra money. You could rent out your house, uh, if you, or receive a roommate. Or, get out of the place you're living in, rent it, and then rent something that is far cheaper, or if you have parents you can stay in to stay at their house while you rent out your other house.

I mean, there's lots and lots and lots and lots of options. Consider selling something. So, I've already touched on this category. When we were getting out of debt, we sold a boat. Was there it was completely paid off But we sold it so that we could pay off the truck and then pay off the rest of the consumer debt So where are we right now?

You guys we have a beautiful porsche 911 in the garage It's a paid off Porsche, okay? If you have any idea, this is a 120, 000 car. We also have a 69 FastPass Mustang sitting in our garage. Another paid off sports car. We have two other vehicles, both also paid off cars. We don't have a car loan. Well, our air conditioning just broke along with the furnace that needed to be replaced.

Um, we have mold in our house, so now we need, do need to do mold remediation. We also are gonna have to rebuild everything. My husband tore up all the carpets, so we need new flooring upstairs. We're gonna need to do bathroom. We're gonna have to redo the ceiling and the kitchen. Big money. What do you think we're doing?

We're selling the Porsche. We don't want to sell the Porsche. We love the Porsche, the Porsche's. Lots of fun. We busted our ass to pay for that car. We're not going to go into debt, so we're selling the Porsche. Hard stuff, right? But that's the reality. That's where we're living right now in this moment. Oh, and by the way, if you didn't know, see that?

I am nine months pregnant with our seventh baby. That, oh by the way, I haven't even bought a car seat for yet. So we are living, we are living in the suck right now. However, we have set ourselves up for success. The car is an asset. It is not a liability for us because it's a paid off car. Because we busted our butts to pay for that car, it now has become an asset rather than a liability.

If you have a loan on a car, that's a liability. If you have a loan on pretty much anything except for a house, Which is a whole different conversation. That's going to be a liability for you. You have to pay that stuff off or sell it. So that it can become an asset for you and work for you. So we're grateful that we have that asset.

We have the secondary asset, which was the Mustang. However, we don't selling the Porsche will more than cover what we need. We don't want to sell the 69 fastback Mustang. It's a beautiful car and it's a classic. There are, Porsches are kind of, you know, a million out there, but those cars, not so much. So consider selling something or downgrading.

All right. What questions do you have? I know I said a lot. I said a lot very quickly, but what, if you have any questions. Feel free to unmute, come on camera, ask away. Not going to guarantee I'm going to know every single answer, but I know a lot. Well, if you don't have any questions that you want to say here, because I get it.

Money is a very sensitive topic. In fact, it happens to be one of the things couples get divorced about most often and fight about most often is money. But it's a conversation you really shouldn't avoid. And debt is something that you also shouldn't avoid either. You and your partner, or if it's just you.

You have to get real raw and real real about how much you guys owe, how much you earn, who needs to start bringing in extra income, where, and what you need to sell in order to get out of the way of debt. Let me tell you, it is ridiculously freeing when my husband comes to me with the budget on our phone and says, okay, let's go ahead.

And we talk about this probably every two or three weeks, especially every month. He says, okay, this is, do we have anything changing in our budget right now? Okay, put this for next month, whatever. He comes to me and he turns the phone around and he says, This is the amount extra we have to spend. Where do you want to put it?

Well, we've already accounted for everything we have to have. We've already accounted for all the other bills that we spend money on, like kids, you know, kickboxing, gym membership for one of our other kids. Um, we've got homeschool expenses that are being paid right now. Once we've paid for everything, there is a number, he says, what do you want to spend that on?

It's so freeing to say, let's add some to the restaurant budget and let's go out to eat tonight. That's really freeing because then you can go out and you can order whatever fits into that budget, guilt free. You can add it to your travel budget. We've been wanting to take that trip to Tennessee and go stay in the mountains in a cabin.

You can book that Airbnb and take that trip without feeling guilty at all. As long as you stay in the budget. That you've set for yourself. All right, so here are some resources that once you get the replay, you can click on these. Um, that could be helpful. So, Dave Ramsey's, um, Dave Ramsey's Academy Financial Peace University was instrumental in helping us.

Um, I really like a lot of stuff that Forbes puts out. So, this one is about a debt relief, um, steps. Those are a lot of what I just talked about, but a few others that you can consider. Another one, um, from Forbes is how to talk to credit card. holders, um, not the holders, but I'm sorry, the, um, like debt managers and then how you can negotiate your credit card debt.

Cause that seems to be what's plaguing most of America right now. All right. So I wanted to thank you. If you don't have any questions, um, anything you want to talk about, I want to thank you so much for being here today. Um, I'm stopping exactly about when I wanted to, which was about 40, 45 minutes. If you want to continue to follow me, you can follow me on Instagram at Tiffany L.

Wicks. I'm on Facebook at Tiffany Wicks. I'm at LinkedIn at Tiffany Wicks. If you want to hear a little bit more about the things that I talk about and the things that I do, um, You can follow my podcast as well. So that's to the nines podcast with Tiffany Wicks. Um, and this is my quote, you don't have to be good to start, but you do have to start.

Most people are running away from the responsibility of their finances, um, both on the income and exiting side of it, because they just don't want to look at it. They figure if they close their eyes. Uh, then somehow it will all just magically go away, and I can promise you it's not going anywhere. It's going to follow you, it's going to get worse, and it's going to create more stress on your life and your partnership, uh, marriage, whatever you've got going on, if you don't remove the blinders and start really getting a Nitty gritty hard look at how much you owe and how much you earn and where there needs to be some pivots And shifts so that you can live a life.

That's way more abundant way more free where you can say I don't have payments on anything. Nobody owns me. There are no creditors coming after me There's nobody going to be calling my phone at eight o'clock at night when i'm trying to rock my baby asleep Saying hey you still owe us money. I mean that is like heart racing, you know, anxiety driven kind of stuff.

Like who's going to call me looking for money now? I will advise as well to stay away from borrowing money from family and friends to pay off debts. If they're willing to give it to you free and clear, a gift, no strings attached, wow, that's generous, but make sure it is actually no strings attached and don't go into any debt where you owe family or friends.

That is a terrible idea for all kinds of reasons. So there you go. Thank you so much for being here. And I hope to see you soon. If you have any questions, you can actually DM me or you can email to the nines podcast at gmail. com. Um, I'll get in there and answer them just as soon as I can. Thank you so much for being here and we'll talk soon.

Ciao guys.