Personal Finance Mastery – Episode 2

The 3 Paths To Debt Freedom

Click Here To Listen To The 3 Paths To Debt Freedom

Show Notes:

In this episode we’re going to talk about our three paths to debt freedom. Each of us, at one point or another, has been drowning in debt and has had to climb out of it on our own. We each chose a unique method to dig ourselves out of the financial holes we were in and are going to share them with you in this podcast.

Mentioned Links:

Mvelopes Software

Mvelopes Review Blog

Transcription:

Adam:  This is Personal Finance Master episode 2.

[Announcement] This is the Personal Finance Mastery podcast where you’ll discover how to master your personal finances, build true wealth and enjoy a more fulfilling and prosperous life. Learn to plan for your future and create your own wealth, away from the shackles of a job. Here are your hosts, on a mission to set you free and teach you the tools to creating true wealth.

Adam:  Welcome to the Personal Finance Mastery Podcast where you’re going to learn how to achieve financial freedom and design your ultimate life. I’m Adam.

Darla:  I’m Darla.

Peter:  And I’m Peter.

In today’s episode we are going to talk about our three paths to debt freedom. Each of us, at one point or another, has been drowning in debt and has had to climb out of it on our own. We each chose a unique method to dig ourselves out of the financial holes were in and are going to share them with you in this podcast.

I will begin with personal saga. Simply put, my debt can be explained by my susceptibility to being seduced by the idea of what I thought wealth was. I thought wealth meant you could just buy whatever you wanted. It must have been the ‘coolness factor’ or the popularity I felt by spending money that kept the spending cycle going.

Having listened to Psycho Cybernetics I now see that it was my poor self-image that caused my bad spending habits to escalate. I needed outside approval from people. I felt that if I spent money on others I’d become popular. If was the guy who – when we all went out for dinner or drinks –picked up the tab, spent the money, shelled out the dough, that everybody would like me.

There was an addiction to this, a sort of high. At the end of the evening my ‘friends’ would say “Hey, thanks so much Pete, that was really cool of you, it was great.” I fed off that approval for years, spending money like crazy, left, right and center. I was trapped, as a result, in a vicious cycle of debt and work. I was also smack in the middle of the rat race, trying to finance this lifestyle that I could not afford.

I was making a five-figure income but spending as if I were making six figures, quite simply. Obviously that couldn’t be sustained indefinitely. Sooner or later it would all come crashing down, but what the heck, I was having a good time despite the fact that I had a financial house of cards that would explode at any moment.

At the time (as I now have the guts to look back) my consumer debt was $80,000. I had loans on my car, my credit cards, and even personal loans. I had no clue that this was unsustainable, but I should have because at the time I was using my entire income just to pay off my minimum payments. I would get my Visa and MasterCard bills and all I could pay off was the interest.

As expected, it took outside intervention to wake me up. What I call ‘the incident’ began was when I sent a payment into a certain bank (which will remain nameless) two days late. I hadn’t realized that my due date had changed, so I just made the payment the way I always had.

I now admit that this was just as much my fault as anything else. I was not very involved with my finances. I was not attentive to my debts. I just tried to avoid them as much as possible. I knew (or thought I knew) when my due dates were for all the various payments I had to make and I made them without paying much attention to the statements at all.

All of a sudden (I am sure you were expecting this) I got charged a late fee. But since I hadn’t been paying attention to my finances, I didn’t realize that I had a late fee. So the following month I made my payment again. It was of course late again, and I made what used to be my minimum payment, which had now grown because of the late fee. Of course I got another late fee and my monthly minimum rose, and this cycle built up and continued for three or four months.

I finally realized what was going on when I finally checked the bill, as was my habit, about once a quarter. I logged in and saw what was going on. I was shocked. I called the bank and tried to make some kind of arrangement to deal with the problem and prevent the snowball effect of the payments getting higher and higher and higher.

This was back before the current economic crisis and the bank did not want to talk to me. They were not interested in making any deals with me. I can still, vividly in my mind, to this day, years later, still remember the representative at the bank saying to me, “Well yes Mr. Sarono, we see you’ve had an excellent record with us for six years, but there’s nothing I can do for you. You made a late payment and we’re not going to reverse the fees.”

At that point the situation exploded and spiraled out of control. I became overwhelmed with the fees, hidden costs, higher interest rate and my debt with this bank exploded. My minimum payments between this bank and all my other creditors – which were already consuming almost my entire paycheck –just bubbled over. I was now spending more money on minimum payments than I was actually making. I went so far as to take a cash advance from another credit card to make the payments on the one I was having the big problem with.

As you can imagine, the situation became a nightmare. I was overwhelmed with stress. I received constant harassing phone calls from creditors, I got bills in the mail all the time – each with ‘late payment’ or ‘past due’ stamped all over the place. The phone calls were relentless and the worker bees who were trying to get your money were rude and abusive. They said horrible things.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had to go through a collection agency or have a collection agency call you. But let me assure you that they treat you and make you feel like you are the scum of the earth, the bottom of the barrel, the worst person in the world. They attack you personally, on the phone.

I really wanted to make my payments, I wanted to pay my bills, but I could not. I felt bad enough about that, and then I had the added pleasure of receiving phone call after phone call and letter after letter hounding and harassing me. Looking back on it, it was a form of abuse.

I was stressed out and overwhelmed and everybody refused to work with me. I tried calling the banks, I tried making payment plans, I tried making arrangements – no deal! Of course, I just kept falling further and further behind. The situation became worse and worse and worse, and I finally got to a point where I was left with no alternative other than to file bankruptcy.

That was a very difficult, personal decision for me. It took a lot of thought before I made it, but I just had no other choice. When it came down to it my choices were:  eat or pay Visa, maintain my health or pay Wells Fargo? I refused to accept those kinds of scenarios, I refused to accept that set of choices.

This led me to what is called the ‘hierarchy of needs’, which is a concept that is talked about in personal financial planning. You have your most important expenses first. Those have to do with taking care of yourself, providing food, shelter, clothing.

Are you familiar with things like that, Darla?

Darla:  Yes. In transportation. All the things that you need in order to get yourself to work and bring home and income.

Peter:  That’s the first tier of the hierarchy, isn’t it?

Darla:  Yes, exactly. Once you have your basic needs met, then you can start working on your goals. If your goal was to get out of debt, that would be your next step. You’d find out how much money you need to take care of yourself with food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and this is how much money I have left. You now allocate the rest to meet your goals.

Peter:  That is how I started looking at it. My mindset changed and I realized that I needed to take care of myself first. I needed to have food, shelter, clothes and a car and be able to get to work so that I could pay my bills and have extra money. Anything left over, yes, I could devote that to the bills.

The banks did not want to deal with that. They didn’t want to listen to me, they didn’t want to talk to me. They kept harassing me and they kept calling me and they kept trying to pressure me into making payments. I told them I couldn’t. I remember one collection company in particular calling me and yelling me on the phone and trying to hard pressure me to pay. I said, “You know what, your credit card – I can’t pay it this month, I’m sorry.” I think he was a little shocked when I told him that and had expected me to make a plea or beg him for more time.

I said, “I have expenses I have to pay and I have ‘x’ amount extra to pay for the bills. This month your credit card didn’t cut it. You don’t get it, and if you keep yelling at me, I’m going to make sure that next month your credit card doesn’t get into the list either. So either hang up and I’ll pay you when I can, or – well, that’s it, there is no other alternative.” I remember that man just sat there in silence.

I had started to use the hierarchy of needs on my finances and when I finally had no other alternative, I did file bankruptcy. My debts got wiped out and I had to start from scratch.

Darla:  What type of bankruptcy did you file? Chapter 7 or Chapter 11?

Peter:  I was able to file Chapter 7.

Darla:  Which means?

Peter:  All my debts were wiped out.

Darla:  You don’t have to pay anything back?

Peter:  No, nothing.

Darla:  You start over?

Peter:  This was before all the new law changes went into effect. Today it is very, very difficult to get a Chapter 7. There are a lot of hoops and hurdles you have to overcome, and I think they usually try to get you into a Chapter 11 (or is it Chapter 13).

Darla:  Maybe it’s Chapter 13.

Peter:  I think it’s 13. Essentially they give you a five-year payment plan that you go through. You still pay your debts back, or at least what you can pay in five years based on what the court assigns. You are on a payment plan, and after five years whatever gets paid is whatever gets paid. After the five years any remaining debt gets wiped out.

At the time, tough I was able to do a Chapter 7 which liquidated all my debt and I started from scratch. Basically the day after I had no debt, zero debt. I had to start everything from scratch. Obviously at that point nobody wanted to give me credit, nobody wanted to extend anything to me?

Adam:  That’s right. What happened during that bankruptcy? Did the court system in a way kind of own you?

Peter:  Yes.

Adam:  So they basically had control of your bank accounts and any money coming in and your privacy was really opened up?

Peter:  Oh yes. Your privacy is gone at that point. The moment you start the filing process you are essentially submitting yourself to the court. You are prostrating yourself to the court and saying, “You know, I can’t handle this, please help me, please take care of me.” The court steps in. They issue the injunctions to stop the creditors and essentially the court takes up your finances.

The arbitrator essentially takes over your bank accounts and takes over your assets. They have a sort of power of attorney over everything you have and they determine what of your assets you can keep, what would be liquidated (if it needs to get liquidated) and they determine the debts that would and would not be paid. They make that final decision if you go into Chapter 13.

If you file Chapter 13, then your checks are made to the arbitrator and the arbitrator turns around and disperses the funds to the creditors. In my case I was able to get a Chapter 7 so  didn’t have to go through that aspect of it.

But you do lose all privacy. The court ends up taking over your finances and makes the determinations about whether or not you can file bankruptcy or not. Bankruptcy is really the option of last resort. It really takes a lot of thought before you go down that path. It’s a very difficult path and produces a lot of long-term repercussions in terms of getting credit again.

Even now, years later with the businesses, the rental properties that are part of some of those businesses – I don’t know if I could even get a credit card. I don’t use credit for my personal debt any more at all. I pay cash for everything that is personal. The only debt I have is through my businesses and through my investments. I only use “good debt” – which is debt that is going to make me money and is being paid for by somebody else and comes through my business.

I don’t even know what would happen if I tried to get debt on a personal level. I don’t even think I could, even after all these years. So yes, there are long-term repercussions that you need to realize will happen if you go down the bankruptcy path.

That being said, if you get to the point where you are butting against those hierarchy of needs, you’re skipping meals or you don’t have enough money to pay for your rent or your housing in order to (for instance) pay Visa, bankruptcy becomes a real option. You simply have to be able to take care of yourself first. Your own personal survival needs must come first – always – before any creditors or any banks.

Darla:  Do you regret filing bankruptcy?

Peter:  No.

Darla:  No, not at all?

Peter:  Not at all.

I don’t like living my life looking back on things that I could have done or should have done or maybe might have, would have done differently. I’m very happy with my life as it is today and I look forward to the future and I’m very excited about the future.

While my past has had ups and downs and good times and bad times, it’s made me who I am now. I wouldn’t change that.

Adam:  I think it’s what you get out of it, too. If you are going to claim bankruptcy and go right back and fall into the same path of destruction, then you’re not doing anything good. But because you have good money management skills…

Peter:  Yes. It did change my life. I do not use debt any more, personally. It changed my whole life. When I hit that bottom I had to rebuilt myself from scratch. I decided to change my whole world, both personally and financially. I got into becoming a businessperson, building business, investing, all sorts of things. I got into personal development, changing my mindset to a more positive outlook on life. I changed everything about my life.

So coming out of it I’m a much better person today than I was before my bankruptcy. Before I was about drinking, partying, having fun, spending money, living a lie, essentially. I think a lot of that stems from some issues in my past. My dad passed away when I was very young and I’ve always been trying to run away from problems and didn’t want to deal with things. The alcohol and drinking and all that got into the picture, but all that changed after the bankruptcy. I was a new person, a different person, dedicated and motivated to making the world a better place, to helping others, being of service to others and having a more positive outlook on life.

I don’t regret the bankruptcy in any way, shape or form, because I’m a better person now than I was before.

Darla:  Good, I’m glad to hear that the bankruptcy has made you a better person.

Now in terms of my story, I had been married before. We had accumulated a lot of debt – over $70,000 just in consumer debt – meaning credit cards, cars, a timeshare that we bought. These were all really stupid things to spend your money on, but nevertheless that’s what we did. We racked up a lot of debt.

We decided we were going to try to get out of debt, and the best way for us to do that was to move out of state. At the time we were living in California and we were making really good money, but a lot of our money was going to taxes and making minimum payments, and on our house. We basically found that we could have similar income in Texas, but our cost of living would be lower.

We ended up selling our house in California and moving to Texas. While we did that we were able to pay off a good portion of our debt. But three months after moving to Texas, we ended up getting divorced. I left him and I came back to my parent’s house and I had to learn how to support myself on my own.

At that time I had a $30,000 student loan, $10,000 left on my Mustang, and then I had to take of and pay for the timeshare that we bought, which was over $13,000. I also had small credit cards here and there that added up to probably about $5,000. All in all I had a lot of debt.

Basically what I did to get out of debt was get myself a job. Then I sat down and looked at all of my debt and I listed the dollar amounts of each debt and what the minimum payments were for each debt. I chose which credit card I was going to pay off first and I would pay all the minimum payments on everything else, except for that one credit card. I was doing what was called the ‘debt snowball method’. It worked. It got me out of debt. It took a couple of years, but I got out of debt.

The other thing I did was I used any kind of bonuses, any kind of overtime, any money I got back such as tax refunds to pay down my debt. I also sat down and looked at my spending habits and I figured out how much I should be spending on shelter, on food, on clothing, on transportation, on utilities – all based on the amount of money that I had coming in.

Peter:  Where did you get the percentages that you should spend on that?

Darla:  I looked it up on Yahoo! Finance. They have recommendation for how much you should be spending on housing, food, and everything else. I looked at the percentages and I converted them into dollar amounts based on my income.

Then I found a very useful tool, an online budgeting program, that really helped me gain control of my finances and helped make sure that I was doing what I said I was going to do, which was pay all the minimums on every credit card except for the one I was trying to pay off (I’d put a couple hundred dollars more towards that credit card). This online program that I used was called Mvelopes. If you’d like to check out Mvelopes, you can go to www.personalfinancemastery.com/resources and you can see Mvelopes there.

I have also written a blog about Mvelopes that I will link with the show notes.

I absolutely love that program because it really helped me take control of my finances. It showed me each time when I overspent in a category which was great because then I could make little adjustments as I needed to. This was very helpful because when you sit down and make a budget or a financial forecasting plan (as I like to call it), you are not going to get it right the first time. In fact you may not get it right the first month, the second month or the third month.

Peter:  It’s an evolution, really.

Darla:  Good point, it really is. It might take you six months. Things change, and especially with inflation today: the cost of food and gasoline has gone up, so those are things that you need to account for when you’re putting together a budget.

Adam:  It’s something that you have to adjust, preferably every month, especially in today’s economy, where prices jump every day.

Darla:  Exactly.

Having that program allowed me to see what my discretionary cash flow was, what I could spend after I paid all my bills. That is what really helped me get out of debt and to this day I still use that program. I love it and have used the Mvelopes system for five years. I am a dedicated, loyal customer.

That’s how I got out of debt, using the ‘debt snowball’ and using Mvelopes.

How about you, Adam?

Adam:  Mine is more like a reckless spending habit story. It began at a young age when I started making some pretty good money, but soon found out that it doesn’t matter how much you make – it’s about how much you keep.

I was spending much more than I was making so I was going deeper into credit card debt every day. I had nine cars by the time I was 21. I took vacations to Europe, to Cabo, Cancun, Hawaii – all over the place. I truly couldn’t afford them, so it all went on credit card. I’d say, “Oh, I’ll pay it off later, what’s $1,000? What’s $1,500 here and it’s not that big of a deal, it’s half of a paycheck.”

In reality when I got the bills I couldn’t pay them. I now know I had been quite irrational about my spending habits for a long time. It wasn’t until one day when I really sat down to look at my finances, when I wanted to go buy a house that I realized this. I sat down and looked at my six-month bank statements and I had been spending more than I made during that time. The mortgage broker kind of laughed at me. He said, “Well, what am I supposed to do with this stuff? You’re showing that you’re spending more than you’re making and your debt-to-income ratio is horrible.”

This made me think about my reckless spending and how I could cut that out. I did what Pete did, too. I’d go to the bars and drink and feel ‘high’ from taking my friends out. I was one of those guys too. We’d all go to the bar to get some drinks and I’d pay for everybody: the dinner, the drinks, everything. It was a really empowering feeling.

Peter:  It is like a high. It’s an empowering feeling and for lack of a better word, it’s like you’re trying to buy love, in some ways. You’re trying to buy the admiration, you’re trying to buy their love. “This round’s on me.”

Adam:  Yes, you’re trying to buy their friendship.

Peter:  Yes.

Adam:  In your own head you maybe don’t think that they’ll be friends with you if you stop this kind of spending habit. It almost becomes an expected habit. After you’ve done this over and over, they always figure ‘it’s on you’ and it becomes customary. But that only gets you into debt and it’s not smart.

So I guess I looked at my finances and realized that everything I was spending on was worthless. I had no assets in my name. Everything was a liability. Whether it was buying a car or going on vacation, it was putting me deeper in debt and I wasn’t getting anywhere. My money wasn’t working for me, it wasn’t making me any money. I was just spending it and I could barely keep up with the minimums on my credit card. I was almost on the verge of claiming bankruptcy as well.

What saved me happened when I went to go buy the house. That mortgage broker who just laughed at me encouraged me to redo everything. I had never been on a budget before. I sat down and put myself on a budget and I came to realize how much I was spending on food, and it was outrageous – I was spending almost my whole paycheck going out to eat or going out drinking. I realized I just had to cut out these extra expenses that I had.

One big thing was that I had a storage unit that I had forgotten about. It was costing me $130 a month and I had forgotten about it for a couple of years. One day I remember I was trying to whittle down the unneeded expenses and realized –

Peter:  All these little extras – $100 here, $50 there, $20 here – all these little charges that you forget about.

Adam:  Exactly. All my little automatic payments: the gym, for example, I went through them all. I realized that one of them was the storage unit and I had been paying it for two years. I didn’t even know what was in it. So I went down there to look at it and found I didn’t need it. When I did the math on it, I figured out that I’d spent a couple thousand dollars on something I didn’t even need. It was all junk. I realized I could either have donated all those things and taken a write-off and not had that expense, and invested that $130 instead and made tens of thousands of dollars over those couple of years through the donations or by selling the contents.

It’s the little things like that, getting rid of them, that help you to realize that the decisions you have made have not been good for your financial health. If you get rid of them, you start to get out of debt. That’s what helped me get out of debt.

Peter:  It’s those little expenses that maybe in-and-of-themselves, or by themselves, don’t make all that big of a difference – but they all add up over the long term! I just had one not too long ago that we realized we have Netflix. We were spending $15 a month on Netflix. “That’s nothing,” you don’t even think about it. But I asked Darla, “When was the last time we watched a movie from there?”

Darla:  A year ago.

Peter:  The last time we watched a movie on Netflix was a year ago, so for the last year we’ve been spending $15 a month for absolutely nothing.

Darla:  What about our cable? Our cable bill is $120 a month and we never watch TV – never! That was another expense we just got rid of.

Peter:  All these little things add up and you’ve had them for years and years and years and you just spend them almost because you feel like you have to. You feel like you have to have a TV, you feel like you have to have cable. I don’t know why. It’s almost like we’re brainwashed to have to have these things. We’re expected to have them, we feel bad if we don’t somehow. But if you don’t use it, and you don’t need it, why are you spending money on it?

Adam:  It’s almost like nowadays having a house phone.

Darla:  Exactly!

Adam:  What’s the point of having a house phone when your cell phone can cover pretty much everything. If you have a cell phone, and 99% of people do, you don’t need a land line. But it just feels if you’ve always had it, why get rid of it.

Peter:  It’s always been there, so you need to have it. But in truth, you don’t. It is those kind of expenses that you can cut out and will really make a difference and enable you to save money. This extra money can be put towards your debt in the ‘snowball effect’ Darla mentioned where you pay off debts. So all the money that formerly went to stupid little things that you don’t really need can now go to paying down your debt and eventually wiping it out entirely. Once you are debt free, you can start putting your money into investments and have it work for you.

Darla:  Adam, how did you get out of debt?

Adam:  Cutting out those unneeded expenses helped a lot. I also realized I needed to make more money. So I started by simply asking for more overtime at my job. There was a lot of it available, but I hadn’t ever taken advantage of that. So I made the sacrifice, sometimes working 20 hour days, but making double-time or time-and-a-half really helped me pay down the outstanding credit card and loan debt that I had.

That was quite a relief. In the middle of it, when you’re working the overtime you may feel like, “Ugh, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to be here.” But when you get that paycheck it feels really good to put that extra money towards the stressors in your life. That little bit of extra time I worked certainly added up financially and definitely outweighs that horrible stress that you feel because you are so in debt.

Darla:  You take a little extra step towards that light at the end of the tunnel when you’ll be completely debt free and you’ll be happy and you won’t have that stress any more.

Adam: That’s exactly right.

In the beginning it’s not about how much you make, it’s about how much you keep.

Peter: Yes, that is what is so important. If you make six figures and spend six-and-a-half, you’re not really making six figures.

Adam:  That was my problem. It wasn’t that I was making bad money, I was just spending too much money. I got rid of all the little extra expenses. I had leased a car and when that came up I was going to lease another one, but I figured it out. I wanted a paid-off car, I want to have no more expenses than I need so I actually just ended up buying that car outright and keeping that car.

All the little decisions made a difference. I stopped going on vacations every three months. Instead I’d save up for them and pay cash for them, not finance them. That was a huge thing.

Peter:  I takes a big change in your mindset to go from financing your lifestyle to paying cash for your lifestyle.

Adam:  That’s right.

Peter:  But it feels so good when you come back from vacation and you don’t have a mountain of debt that you’ve just racked up. I know what it feels like to come back from vacation and feel like, “Now I have to go to work to pay off the thousands of dollars I just spent on my trip.” I can get back home and start saving for my next vacation.

Adam:  Exactly. It’s so different now, being entrepreneurs and going on vacation was a business trip and talking about business, freeing your mind and trying to get out of the day-to-day stress. Now the vacation becomes a write-off, so it’s even better.

Peter:  We don’t even take vacations – or use that word. As an entrepreneur, as investors, our mind is always on the clock (so to speak) in some ways. We always have ‘workations’. We are always talking about business, sitting down and planning our next business or talking about our current business or talking about an investment we can get into or a current investment. Our minds are always working to find opportunity.

The world is filled with opportunity, and we’re always finding it and searching for it. Everything we do now is a ‘workation’.

Darla:  Yes. It’s really simple to know what you need to do. You need to pay cash for everything, you need to stop accumulating debt, you need to stop using your credit cards.

But it’s not easy. It takes a lot of hard work. You are changing your behaviors.

Adam:  New habits are hard to learn.

Darla:  Exactly. They take time.

Peter:  By no means did this happen overnight for any one of us.

Darla:  No.

Adam:  This was a long, hard, slow process.

Peter:  There is no 20-minute synopsis, really on what happened. It was years of trial and error.

Adam:  It took months and months and years and years and constantly trying. You would take two steps forward and one step backwards sometimes, or at least it seemed like that. You will have setbacks, you are going to have some things that are very much an uphill battle. That’s the reality of the situation. But as long as you stick to it and you stay dedicated and committed to it, you can fight your way out of debt.

The first step of all of it – and we all started here – is realizing where you’re at. Knowledge is power. You need to pay attention to your finances. You need to get the big picture of your money, where it’s coming from and where it’s going. You must know that.

Darla:  Absolutely. You need to sit down and look at your spending habits.

Peter:  Exactly. The whole incident that I have that spiraled everything out of control was because I wasn’t on top of my finances, because I didn’t want to pay attention to my finances. If I had just looked at the darn thing, I would have known that they had changed the due date by two days and who knows what could have happened. I would have known that and all the chaos and insanity that happened afterwards never would have happened if I had just been able to be on top of my finances and knew what was going on.

Adam:  Absolutely right. Because when you don’t know what’s going on with your finances and  you suddenly find yourself underneath a mountain of debt you become so stressed out and overwhelmed that you don’t even want to open your mail. Some may say that ‘ignorance is bliss’ – but not in this case, not in the long run. You must always realize where you are at financially and where you can improve.

Darla:  That pretty much wraps up our three ways of how we got out of debt.

Adam:  If you have any comments or questions, you can always go to ideas@personalfinancemastery.com and you can leave any type of comment of question and we will do our best to answer.

Peter:  Just send us an email. If you have ideas for topics that you would like us discuss on the show, let us know. We are here to be of service to you – that is our core mission. We want to help you master your finances and live the lifestyle of your dreams.

Adam:  Absolutely. Because if we did it, you can do it too.

Peter:  Yes, you can definitely do it. Just send us an email at ideas@personalfinancemastery.com.

Until next time, I’m Peter.

Darla:  I’m Darla.

Adam:  And I’m Adam.

Darla.  Thank you so much for listening.

[announcement]

Thanks for listening to The Personal Finance Mastery podcast. For more wealth-building tips and tools customized to fit your financial needs, go to personalfinancemastery.com.

You Might Also Like:

• Your Rights Regarding Credit Repair
• 4 Steps To Better Focus
• Do You Know Your Financial Truth
• 7 Credit Card Myths Uncovered
• 5 Money Tips For The College Freshman