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So, if you're trying to get out of debt, do the debt snowball from smallest to largest. Look it up. Just it's called the debt snowball. You pay off your debts from smallest to largest. Um, regardless of what the interest rate is, because the reason why you do it that way is because you have small wins, like small wins, meaning you pay off the smallest one, you do you celebrate, pay off the next smallest one, you celebrate. By the time you get to the biggest one, you already know that it's possible because you've been you've paid off so many debts up until that point. So, smallest to largest, get rid of that debt, don't go back into debt. You know what I mean? That's the main thing that I like to uh tell people because it's a personal experience of mine. Um you're gonna there's gonna be a lot of pushback, uh, people people saying like you need to be in debt, there's good debt, yada yada, all this stuff. But uh, we just chose my wife and I to get out of debt because it's more it's freeing, like we we are free, we're financially free, we don't owe anybody any money, we don't owe the banks money, we don't owe interest. It's just so it's so freeing to be uh out of debt and not owe anybody money. Uh so when you're trying so getting out of debt is is one thing. Next thing is once you're out of debt, start saving for retirement into a into I use I have a Roth IRA uh in into Growth Stock Mutual Funds. Um, I use American funds, uh, and they have uh a growth fund that we're in right there. It's basically kind of like index funds, I don't know too much about it, but like index funds in that there's a bunch of different commodities or whatever you call them inside of one fund, uh, and so it grows as a whole. And just put money away, sock money away into that. Don't I mean look at it? The market, of course, is gonna go up and come down, but just leave it in there by the time it you're ready to take it out. You've got you've got a good nest egg, and you can pull out enough to live off of while still having money in there to accrue interest uh with the market. Um, so do that, stay away from the car loans, don't get into debt, pay off your your mortgage early. Uh once you're out of debt, you have a lot of money, you have enough money to play able to put more to your your uh mortgage um um so that you can pay that off early, and then you're like totally completely debt-free. Like, you don't have anything, no, no more, no nothing, man. You've got money in your pocket at that point. Uh, we're I'm at we're at that point, and it took us less than 10 years, I believe, to pay off our uh mortgage. We c we call it a mortgage, but we were actually buying it directly from the owner without without a loan or anything like that. So we were very fortunate to be able to get that case scenario. Um, so we paid it off, no mortgage, no nothing, bro. Like it's so free. Uh, like we eat out pretty much whenever we want to. Uh, sometimes when work is slow for me, uh, we have to be get tighten up the budget a little bit more. My wife and I both having an income. Um, if you're on a single person income and you're trying to live on a two-person income, why are you doing that to yourself? Live on a one-person income if that's all you make. Doesn't make any sense to try to like live on two people income, meaning like you have you have a crew of all this debt, you know what I mean? All these credit cards. You don't need all those credit cards, bro. Like, if you're if you're trying to live on a two-person income and we have a one-person income, stop doing that. Stop doing that to yourself. You're just sabotaging yourself, you're sabotaging your your financial freedom. Uh, and it's not it's it's not fun, it's not fun. What else am I talking about? Uh, I'm out here in the Texas heat, obviously, just trying to do a change of pace, change of uh atmosphere. Uh taking a little break from work. I just got finished unloading, so I'm here checking it out. Thanks for thank you, Lord, for the clouds. It's sunny out here. I gotta wear a long sleeve shirt and the type of work that I have. Uh, let me see what else. Yeah, like so. One of the things when you're getting out of debt is you're gonna you're gonna get a lot of pushback from your friends and your family at people that preach that debt is good. So a lot of it for us was going against the grain and not listening to what other people were saying that going getting out of debt is a bad idea, is a lot of what they were telling us. Um, so you may lose some friends along the way, you know what I mean. You may lose some friends along the way, uh, but you just you just got to you just gotta not try to not listen to them, don't listen to them, and just can continue to keep your hands to the plow. Don't look keep the the blinders on, you know what I mean? Where you're looking straight at the debt, getting it out, getting it out of the way. So there's gonna be a lot of pushback from people saying, like, you should do this, you shouldn't get out of debt. That's not a way to do it. You gotta upcode your credit score, you need a credit score to get a house, all this other stuff, man. To be honest, a lot of times those people are are drowned, have their own debt problems, and and it seems like to me, like they want people to be in that wallowing with them because they're the ones they made that decision too. They want to have nice things, you know what I mean, and they feel like debt's the only way to get them. Which if you start off with not a lot of stuff, obviously you gotta work your way up to that, you know what I mean. And it's possible to do that, you know, with honest on a with an honest living, it's just a lot of going against the grain. There's a lot of social policing, like people telling you you gotta do this, you gotta do that, you know what I mean. So you just gotta get past that. You gotta get past that thing where people are judging you, like saying, like, no, you shouldn't do it like that, you should do it like this. So um, that's one thing that you have to really um deal with whenever you're getting out of debt because it's not the norm. Let's face it, it's not the norm. What's what's the national debt? You know what I mean? The national debt, what what what's the the amount of credit card debt that Americans have, the amount of car debt that Americans have. I mean, look at the um just the average car payment is what like $700 now, close to like between $500 and $700. I mean, bro, like that's every month that is going to banks and stuff like that when you could just be putting it in your pocket. Not to mention your mortgage. How much is your mortgage? Once you get your mortgage and your heart and your your car payment going to your pocket instead of to to to loans and paying off banks, you got that money to actually build wealth, you know what I mean? You can build wealth pretty fast. Um depending on how how fierce you want to go, you know what I mean? Because if you're married like me, like if you're single, like you can man, you can knock it out pretty fast, you know what I mean? Because being married, your you and your wife are in it together, and you'll have to be on in agreement on things, you know what I mean, and stuff like that. So there's that's a whole different aspect of it as well. So um, yeah, just getting out of debt is is is a is a thing. Um emergency fund. An emergency fund is uh is a it's a safety mechanism put in place to for insurance for whenever things happen, like acts like accidents or uh uh emergencies, like you know, like if something happens to your car, the alternator goes out, you got an extra some extra money set aside for those emergencies. If the air air conditioning goes out, especially in this Texas heat, man, you got air conditioner workers making some money right now because their air conditioners are going out, whatever the case may be. But um, so having that money set aside for emergencies is is something to have while you're in getting out of debt. Uh Dave Ramsey, which we've the the which is the plan we followed in getting out of debt, which is have a thousand dollars of worth the a thousand dollars set aside for emergencies. Some people may not think that it's enough, but you're not gonna the the plan is to to to take not that long to get out of debt because you want gazelle intensity, you want to stop the subscriptions, you want to stop the necessary spending, you want to get on the budget. That way you can pay off that debt fast enough to be able to be like, all right, once we once we paid it off that consumer debt, we can now save three to six months uh worth of expenses, three to six months worth of expenses while we're paying off the mortgage, you know what I mean. So the the plan for the thousand dollar emergency fund while you're getting out of debt is is to not stay there for longer than so many years because the average person that does do the debt snowball, they pay it off in like less than five years or something like that. So the plan is once you pay off your your consumer debt, then you increase your emergency fund to three to six months of expenses. Three to like, okay, so three to six months of expenses means if you didn't have a job for for three to six months, how much money would you need to carry you through to find the next job after that six months? So, how much money it is like for your bills, not your credit, not your at this point you're out of debt, right? So it's three to six months of expenses out of debt. So, what do you need to pay? Your your car insurance, your home insurance, uh what else are you paying? The mortgage at that point, you're paying only you know, phone bill, things of that nature. How much money do you need for three to six months to carry over for three to six months if you was to lose your job? You know what I mean? That's that's the the rule of thumb for three to six months of expenses. Uh let's see, what else? Yeah, and then three to six months of expenses. Then, then at that point, once you save that up with gazelle with gazelle intensity after paying off the debt, then you can start chunking at your mortgage. All those payments that that all that money that you were putting to savings or paying off debt, it goes to retirement. Like uh a Roth IRA. If it doesn't, if 401k is not offered at your job, get a Roth IRA through one of like we get it through American funds. Um, you can go to Dave Ramsey's website, he's got a whole bunch of people that you can like talk to as far as I think it's like Smart Vestor Pro. I'm not sure exactly what it's called, but we went through there and we found this guy to help us out to get our Roth IRA, which is basically our own way of putting away putting a 401k. So it's big it's basically a 401k, but we create they created it for us specifically, so we have we have to take the money from whenever we get paid to put it in uh the Roth IRA instead of depending on like a job to put it take it out before taxes and put it away for you. Instead, after we get paid, boom, we take it and put it in the Roth IRA, and then in into mutual funds. Um, you can do index funds. I you know, I'm not a financial guru, but we put it in mutual funds, growth stock mutual funds, um, that have that have a long history of 10 or more. It's been it's been open for 10 or more years, and it has like 11 to 12 percent return over that 10 years over time, and you you learn how to pick them, you know what I mean. Like, so once you get to that retirement phase, then you start researching okay, how do I retire? How much do I want to retire on? How much do I need to be putting away every month, every week, so that I can have enough money once I get to retirement to take that retirement money out. Because a lot of us we say, oh yeah, at retirement, I'm gonna take out this money at retirement. I'm gonna do this or whatever. Without even having a plan, we say that. I used to be like, Oh, yeah, when I when it comes to retirement, I'm gonna do this, this, and this. And I didn't even have a plan, like, I didn't even know what retirement was. I was dependent on Social Security for retirement, bro. So your social security uh is not enough. It's not enough. Think about like how can you live on a thousand dollars a month, nine hundred dollars a month? Can you live on that? That's what social security is. That's why you create your own retirement plan in a Roth IRA if you don't have a 401k with your job, so that way you can have you can so basically retirement is gonna replace your income when you stop working. How much man, how much income do you have coming in right now? How much are you living off of right now? Are you gonna be able to take that out each month, each week out of your retirement to live on that after you stop working? Those are the things to think about when it when it comes to retirement. So, best of luck, you guys. If you need help with this, I can help you out with this uh as much as I can. Uh, I and this is just uh my personal experience. I I can show I can tell you how I did it and how it's working for me and me being debt free is awesome, like it's an amazing feeling, and I just hope that and wish that for the people that are watching this video. A key thing, too. I'm ADD, bro. I'm ADD. I mean, grew up in South Texas, bro. Like, where we're thinking like we always have to have a car payment, we're never gonna get ahead. This, this, and that, bro. It's possible, man. It's just having the mindset and getting to that place where you think it's possible and where you know it's possible. So hopefully, this is encourages you guys. Thanks a lot for watching. Questions, comments, leave them below. Um, thanks a lot. Have a good one, bye.