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Talking about being debt-free, uh having a debt-free journey for probably about three years now, like completely and totally debt-free. No house payments, no car payments, no student loans, no nothing, nothing at all. And consumer debt, which is like car payments, student loans, credit cards, anything aside from the house that is debt, that has been paid off for about five years, six years now. Uh it's amazing. It's an amazing feeling to be out of debt. There, it's true, like, because we listen to Dave Ramsey, right? It's true, like what they say, like what he's saying. Like it's freedom. It's basically fru you feel free. Uh and I'm a truck driver. I'm a truck driver. At the time my wife was uh an uh paramedic. A lot of overtime, tons of overtime trying to get you know, working on getting out of debt. My mom watched my daughter excuse me, while that had happened. She so my daughter really doesn't understand what being in debt is. Neither does my my son. Because they're both they're both they're both born into us, my wife and I, not having debt. And it's an awesome feeling. Um what can I talk about? What can I talk about for the people that are on their debt-free journey? What I can talk about is the a lot of the social policing that goes on. Social policing meaning like people saying that no, you shouldn't get out of debt. This is how society does it. Um, so you should stay in debt. You should get a credit card and maintain it and maintain your credit score, all this other stuff. Um you're gonna live like this, you're not gonna have the nicest things, you're not gonna have the nicest car, yada yada, you're not gonna have the big screen TV, you're all this stuff. Like, and my wife and I, we knew that going in. We knew that going in that we knew certain things going in, right? Like that we had to ignore the the people they're trying to socially police us, right? We had to ignore them. We knew that going through it was totally different because it's just it was just me and my wife, but the only ones going through it. Nobody could go through it with us because we were the only ones paying the debt off. When we started paying off debt, we sold a lot of stuff. We sold a big a big TV, put that money, we put that money that we we got, we put it towards the debt. Like we it was it was insane. I sold several instruments, guitars, bass guitar, amplifiers, just to get out of debt because we were so we think about it. We paid off debt we paid off $46,000 in less than two years. Sounds insane. But it's possible when you put your head down and work. Work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, like tons of work. And when we got to about like the last the last year, the last six months, seven months of paying off the rest of our debt, which was the hugest debt, which was the the uh our student loans, everything was going to that because that's what was left. We paid off before that, we paid off credit cards, we paid off Best Buy, we paid off the rent, the rental center, uh, like all the all the main bills that we had, but the biggest one was my student loans. And we were seeing it was like thousands, like thousand to two thousand dollars just going boom, just going straight to to the debt that student loan debt. And we was like thinking, like, dang, and we would have the money in our hand, like all this money is gonna be ours when we when we finish paying off the debt. Like, we're gonna have all this extra money in our pocket. And so that was an awesome feeling to be able to say to see that we were gonna have that. And people like we told people our story, and they're like, wow, how did you do that? Yada yada, and you can tell that they want that. Um, hold on a second. All right, bear with me here, guys. Okay, yeah, oh my gosh. Total technical difficulties, and I couldn't I couldn't stop myself from doing it. My ADHD got in the way. But yeah, getting out of so it was insane. Like a lot of people, we told a lot of people, and people were like, wow, that's cool. And you could tell some people really some people wanted that. Some people were watching those videos because I was posting our journey on Facebook, and I could tell some people really wanted that. Like, how did you do that? How did you do this? It takes work, like it takes work, and people are still social policing me and us. Because my my car is 2006, my car's almost 20 years old. It's a Honda Civic. And it's like, are you we and the way we do it too? Like, if we want a new car, so we we'll save up the money because we have the cash flow to be able to save up pretty quick to buy a new car. Like we in less than a year we could buy a brand new car if we wanted to. Or or a nice used car for like $10,000. If we really wanted to, because and and the and the way to do it is to save that money. Like, it's like the old school way of thinking like if you don't have the money for it, then you can't buy it. Which is a principle that I'm teaching my daughter. Like, you have to work for your money because she works. She works in the house, she cleans her room, she gets paid. And if she wants a toy, makeup, jewelry, whatever, whatever stuff she little girls want, she's got she knows that she has to save up for it and buy it, buy it, buy it cash, you know. And that is like unheard of nowadays because everybody has a credit card, everybody wants to go go out shopping on Saturdays because they work hard during the day, during the week, and like the attitude is like, I want to go spend money, and my attitude our attitude changed after getting out of debt. Our attitude was like it before we got out of debt, it was really like a spending attitude. Like we we felt like we had to go and spend money. Um we felt like we go we had to go and spend money every weekend because it's it was just a thing to do. You have that, it's like an urgency or um like an addiction to like spending. And then we would get to the point where our the credit card was maxed out, or we didn't have money, and it's and we wanted to buy more and more and more, and then we would get upset, then we will fight. And we just my wife and I just knew that we had to that there had to be some type of gift, there had to be some type of change, and that's when I found out about being debt-free, financial freedom, and all this stuff, right? And I was like, oh, okay. So you're saying that we don't have to have a credit card? You know, it's possible to do it like this, you know? And um and then once we figured that out, we were just like, okay, we're all in. So a lot of that mindset had it has changed since then. When we were getting out of debt, we had to unlearn how to we had to unlearn that we don't have to spend money to have fun. We don't have to spend money to be joyous. We found the public park, the public pool. That's what we found. We were just like, okay, what can we do? And and we and we've learned to enjoy staying home. Like we have movies here, we have games, we've got books, we've got things here. I'm trying to show you my trying to show you my bookshelf, but it's messy back there. Um we have stuff that we can do that we don't have to do with money. We learn how to go to the park, the pool, be home. You know, we don't always it's okay to be home all day on a Saturday. Why not? You find stuff to do, you know, and that's and that's and that's just that short amount of time for uh of getting out of debt. Because once you get out of debt, then you actually have money to go spend to go to the movies, you know, go out, drive out of town, spend, spend it, spend the weekend out of town or something, go on a trip, you know, because when getting out of debt, you learn how to be responsible. I learned how to be responsible with money because my wife and I, we had to have a budget. We had to develop a budget because we had other expenses along with paying off debt. We had phone bill, cable bill, inch, car insurance, how home insurance, uh, you know, all the stuff that we pay month monthly subscription. We got rid of a bunch of subscription services that we didn't need, like the gym, you know, we got rid of Netflix, we got it rid of uh Amazon. That was like during getting off debt. But after getting out of debt, we've got more we have more subscription services than we had before. But we can because for doing a budget and being responsible with the money, we decided we found out like, okay, now we can have subscriptions if we wanted to. Because like now we can pay for YouTube premium. We don't have to deal with ads. Because there's no debt, there's no money that goes to car payments, loans, you know, all this stuff. So learning how to be content, like going to the park or going to the pool, watching movies at home, being content at home without go having to go out and spend money during during getting out of debt is just that little temporary time. And for those those two lessons for those two years of getting out of debt We still have a budget and we still are responsible with our money to where it's like, do we even want to go out? You know what I mean? Like you know, it's it's like we're we learned to be content with just going to the park and having money in the bank. We learn how to be content to just go to the movies every you know, every three weeks or every two weeks. Whatever, you know what I mean? We learn how to to buy gear, like I bought this microphone, I bought a camera, I bought uh a mixer for my microphone because we had the money to do it, like we cash, boom, no debt, no credit card. Get cut the middleman out, just here, two paychecks, boom, all here's all my gear. It's amazing. Like it's amazing to be debt free because you don't you don't have to like you don't have to be at like another thing too is I don't have to be at work worried about paying paying that payment every month. Like I could afford to be like, okay, I don't have a load today. I'm a truck driver. I don't have a load today, okay, cool. You know, eventually I'll get a load and have that money coming in. And and the end of my wife works as well, you know what I mean? The two of us work. It's it's like uh it's freeing because it's like, oh, no money from for this week from work because work is slow, okay, cool, no problem. As opposed to before when I wasn't dead, like, oh shoot, I need to work, I need to, I need to figure out, I need to hustle, I need to figure out how to make this money to pay the loans. And now it's just like eh, all good. You know, and they're and they like even now we can go like we had to we had to drain the savings because we had to do some work on the house. We had to do some plumbing, some electrical, uh, some other things that the house needed, right? Because the house is the plumbing was really old. We had to change the vent line that went from the plumbing up uh up and out of the house. The the the drainage system, the electrical system uh underneath the house was was trashed, so we had to put another, you know, paste a bunch of money. So the emergency fund that we had had, which that's another topic that I could talk about, the emergency fund that we had had was depleted, right? So we had to go back into that mode of saving or or getting out of debt mode to restock the emergency fund. Um, and it was like that took like like a month, two months, and we're just like, okay, for for four weeks, for five weeks, we're just gonna save everything. We've done this before. We've we've we've gotten out of debt, it took us two years, but we're only gonna take two months, fine. So we just work and work and work, save whatever, whatever, whatever is left over at the end of the budget for that week, for that month, boom, throw it back into the emergency fund. Emergency fund stocked up. Now we can go back to being a little a little bit somewhat luxurious, you know, by eating out, going to movies, whatever. That's another thing we did too when getting out of debt was we stopped eating out. We had a grocery budget, we took lunch to work. Now like we can eat out whenever we want. Pretty much. Like it's we I mean, we do. You can tell I got a little belly here, but like you sacrifice those however long it's gonna take you to get out of debt. I mean, it took us two years, guys. And we get I think we get stuck, like even me, I was stuck in the mentality like it's gonna take me 15 years to get out of debt because my my student loans are accruing interest every year, and it's gonna take long. And that was actually that was actually like paralyzing me and stopping me from starting to pay off debt because I was deferring it. I was like, you know what, I'll start paying it off next year. I'm still looking for a job, whatever, yada yada. But no, like it does, it doesn't take that long if you're really focused and and stop eating out, get rid of the subscription servers, sell some stuff, like all that stuff that because my coworker one day he called me a Dave Ramsey purist because I was getting out of debt and he was making fun of me. And the reason why I bring that up is because like the stuff that Dave Ramsey talks about, like it's really actually true. Not I mean this the stuff regarding like financial freedom, being debt-free. Um, like where he says like rice and beans, beans and rice. Like, we didn't eat rice and beans, beans and rice, literally. But we we had a budget, we took sandwiches to work, we took yogurts, you know. We we stopped eating out for lunch. Not entirely, like every now and then we would be like, I want a burger, so we'll get a burger, whatever. As a reward, like like for instance, we'll put we would pay off a small credit card that was like $200. We paid it off, or like we would celebrate by like going out to eat, you know, little stuff like that. Every now and then, you know, reward yourself. Ma'am, I've been six months just paying off stuff. Let me let me buy myself something, you know what I mean? Um, yeah, so what he what Dave Ramsey talks about is I think it's it's true. Like, like live on beans and rice, rice and beans, not literally, but what that means is you you you buy stuff from the grocery store and you take it to lunch and eat it. Or you cook you cook your dinners at home, you cook your lunch at home, you cook your breakfast at home instead of eating out. That's what I think that's what rice and beans, beans of rice means, and that's what we did. Sold some stuff. We sold a bunch of stuff, we sold guitars. I still had like I let me see. I had a seven-string electric guitar, I had a five-string bass guitar, I had a classical guitar, and then I had a bass amp, a guitar amp. That's five instruments. Sold those and paid off. I had this debt with this person, it was like $500. I sold like two guitars, boom, paid that guy off. Don't have to deal with him ever again. So sell some stuff. Um, what else? Make a budget, live on less than you make, like all that stuff that Dave Ramsey says, as far as getting out of debt goes, works. Like it really, really works. And that that was the and and we would listen to him, we would listen to his calls, like of the people getting out of debt like us, and that was helping us too because we were thinking, like, it's possible, like, there's other people that are doing it too. So we didn't feel alone. That's another thing, too. We didn't feel alone when getting out of debt because we knew that there was other people working on the same goal, and which is the main reason why I'm making this video for the people that are trying to get out of debt. Look, I'm a living testimony to doing it, and I'm a truck driver, I make truck driver income locally where I live. And my wife was a paramedic at the time, she switched careers, so she makes a little bit more money now. But that those types of salaries, it's possible, you know what I mean? We're not doctors, we're not freaking engineers or nothing like that. We're blue-collar people, and you have to decide, you have to pick your like pick your poison, like decide what you want to do and go at it and do it. And know that there's gonna be social police, people saying, no, you can't do this, you shouldn't do this, you should do it like this, you should maintain your credit score, you should maintain a credit card and pay it off every month and all this stuff. And I'm like, no, I don't want to do all that. Like, even now, that's too much work, and like what to create to uphold a score? Like, no, why do I involve why do I want to involve my hard-earned money to to keep my credit score at a certain level? There maybe there are some guys, like I've seen some real estate gurus, they need a credit score and this and that, la la la. But I don't want to no, I don't want that. And we have to tell those people that are trying to social police us, like, no, I don't want that. I want this. I've seen people getting out of debt, they look happy. I'm gonna try it out. And we're still debt-free to this day. It's been five five years completely and totally out of debt. It's funny how the how the light shifts, the ISO shifts. Whenever I move around with this camera, it's funny. Uh, maybe I should just set it, set the ISO to like a thousand or eight, eight hundred. Sorry, I got sidetracked there, you guys. Um, yeah, so getting out of debt is huge. And you have to ignore the naysayers, you have to ignore the people that are trying to police you and say no. You have to tell them no, like, I know you have to tell them, like, I know the way you're doing it is working, I see you doing it, it looks well. And let me tell you, but I'm gonna do it this way, right? Yeah, let me tell you about something I learned about what actual social policing is for the person trying to police you. It is like for one reason, is that the person that is trying to tell you no, like, don't do it like this, you do it like this instead, or they're trying to keep you in a box, basically, they're trying to keep you bound, they're trying to control you, is is because maybe it makes them look bad. Maybe they've tried to get out of debt, but they didn't, and they they they went with the crowd, and now they're trying to bring you with them to the crowd. So when it comes to people like that, you just gotta tell them no. Tell them no enough times, stand your ground, and eventually they'll leave, go try to find other people to control. And it's pretty it's it is it seems like a sad existence to me if if those people are trying to do that to you. So, and that's in anything in life, like with being with financial freedom, with you know, your side hustle, the way you make money, the way you raise your kids, how your marriage is like every people are always trying to control every aspect of your life, like certain people, not all of them. And um, that's one of the things that I try to avoid and that I want to avoid in my lifestyle. So um the takeaway for getting out of debt, the takeaways for like the actual takeaways and things that you can practice in your life for getting out of debt. One, ignore the naysayers, tell them no, and continue to do you. If you're married, work together with your spouse. Um have the same bank account, get on a budget, make a zero-based budget, see what's coming in, see what's going out, put it on a piece of paper if you have to. You don't have to use a fancy spreadsheet. Just get a piece of paper, write it out, tack it to the fridge, you know, uh magnet it, magnet it to the fridge. That way you look at it every time you go to the fridge. Um, ignore the snaysayers, make a budget, get on the same page with your spouse if you're married. What else? Um, sell some stuff if you need to to get out of debt. I mean, take a look at all the stuff that's in your apartment or your house and decide do I really need this for this amount of time that it's probably gonna take? Um sacrifice, sacrifice for those two years or one year or however. I mean, what is it? I I don't know, I don't know. Yeah, sacrifice for that for that little bit amount of time. Um sell some stuff. What else? Get rid of the subscriptions, subscription services that you don't necessarily need. Figure out, I mean, it's like all those subscriptions and all the all the side, all the other stuff aside like the hobbies and stuff, like when you're getting out of debt, like really just working and coming home, working and coming home, you don't have time for that stuff. You don't have time for it. I mean, you don't have time to watch a movie because you're you're either you know working or you're going home to sleep. And find out like find out ways to find out ways to entertain yourself to where you don't need a subscription service. Uh buy DVD, go old school, buy DVDs. You know what I mean? That's what we did. We had instead of DVD, we had a TV that had a VHS. And we would go to the dollar store, not the dollar, we would go to half-price books and buy VHS tapes for a dollar. That was crazy. You know what I mean? Do stuff like that. Um what else can I share? Yeah, I that that's it, you guys. Um, if there's anything else that you'd like for me to share on as far as this debt for debt-free journey for yourself or the experiences that me and my wife went through in getting out of debt, uh I I I would I would like to share that with you guys if you have any suggestions or comments uh that I can share with you guys. But, anyways, uh that's enough of my time. You guys, you guys, if you like this video, share it. Um uh leave a comment. I'm out. See y'all later.