This popped up in my Facebook memories the other day:
“Looking up info about my student loan … It will accrue $77.45 in interest in the next 25 days. This thing has got to go.”
(It’s long gone!)
Years ago, I saw an exercise where the writer* took a calendar. She calculated how much she made per day. She colored in the calendar for how many days of work it took her to pay for each of the expenses she had.
I don’t remember what her calendar looked like. But I know that she made interest a separate category.
She had a visual representation of how many days she had to work every month just to pay interest.
It was powerful and motivating.
There are a lot of finance “gurus” out there who will sell you a plan for reducing your debt. All of those plans work for some people. None of them work for all people.
Some don’t work for everyone’s income level. Some don’t work for everyone’s state of mind or way of thinking about the world.
Anyone with disposable income can pay off debt faster than they are now, if it becomes their priority. There are tons of reasons why it’s not people’s priority, from comfort shopping to gambling addiction to not enough emotional energy to deal with it to sheer lack of willpower against “cute” things or things that are a “good deal.” And on and on. As much variety as any “I know I would be better off if I did This Thing but I’m not doing The Thing.”
Life is less stressful with less debt. We trash talk “kids these days” who are looking for instant gratification, but it’s not just the kids…
*I don’t remember what the site was or who the writer was or I would give credit. If you know, let me know. Or maybe this is a fairly common thing to do, but I don’t remember seeing it again…