Are you looking for an AMAZING INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY?!!
In honor of Amazon Prime Day (an official new celebrated holiday), we decided to do something horrific and shocking!
My wife Mae and I are now debt-free (except for our home).
We paid off our credit cards, old business credit lines (I also settled many debts in the last decade), sold things, scraped, drove old cars, earned extra income everywhere we could, built side hustles and businesses, and we applied the AdvoCare DebtBuster System (thank you Ron Reynolds), as well as read all the Dave Ramsey stuff, of course (which is the same information, but you have to pay money for it, lol… and yes I included links to Amazon for that last one just for a touch of irony).
I normally don’t like to share too much private information on the Internet (and especially not to The Facebook), but this one is a very important issue to me. I have written a lengthy blog post about the power of becoming debt free.
At the height of my ignorant journey, I accumulated approximately 2.2 MILLION DOLLARS OF DEBT.
It all started with a few good decisions that went bad. I invested in real estate before the crash, along with pouring my life savings and living on credit cards while building a gym. The equipment alone was floated by leases to the tune of $500,000 and then there was also the pesky retail space rent at $13,000 per month before the CAM charges.
Then the economy tanked.
In addition to that pressure, and in spite of signing up 635 members in the heat of the summer, there was also the fact that my partner and I could not get along.
Interestingly, I remember one day that was an early sign that we had different goals.
Thinking that I was just like every other sales guy that he had ever met, my partner turned to me one particularly stressful day and attempted to motivate me to work harder and more hours (I was only at ten hours per day at that point).
“You’ll be able to buy whatever car you want!”
I think my response perplexed him. My facial expression was one of disinterest, and maybe even lackluster.
Sensing the disconnect, my partner’s manipulative smile melted into dismay. I think he was sincerely bamboozled that I was not responding the stereotypical way that every materialistic and money-motivated type-A personality go-getter had ever responded to him before.
He thought he had me pegged, but he was sadly mistaken.
I responded with what I would much later discover to be the very beginning of the end of our relationship:
“I don’t want fancy cars or clothes. I don’t want any of that stuff… I just want TIME.”
…And with that one simple statement, a shadow loomed over our relationship and our future. I think he might have known deep down that he could not control me, and that I would never be the type of pawn that he wanted me to be, nor would he be the type of person I wanted to be working with.
Eventually, after many more arguments and battles, he cast me out and changed the locks and that was that.
The business failed, they all declared bankruptcy and one of the partners even had to leave the state to start over in his sixties. It was a sad year. Very sad.
…
My wife is AMAZING in that she actually stayed married to me. My wife is an angel from heaven. I dare say that many lesser women would have found it much easier to leave when we were losing my gym business, losing properties, losing life-savings, watching my parents die of cancer without being able to help with their medical bills, living in a never-finished remodel and fighting over whether we could afford to go out to eat on a date night or perhaps go on a business trip to pursue a new opportunity that had no guarantee of success.
Getting out of debt wasn’t all miserable hardship though!
Somehow we still managed to spend a lot of time with family and even take vacations! My wife is the best shopper on the planet Earth (and not the kind that frivolously spends money, but the kind that can get us all to a sunny beach on a budget).
Admittedly, these are first-world problems which I am a bit ashamed of. However, the structure of modern life and it’s insidious assumptions about success being a matter of more money requiring more work in a vicious cycle of consumerism that can get the better of any of us is an ever-present reality. So it is all relative and we are all subject to its pressures.
As Richard Koch (author of the best-selling 80/20 Principle) says in his book Living the 80/20 Way:
“It is not innate greed that propels us toward wanting more with more. It is the structure of modern life and its compelling, insidious assumptions. Modern life insists that success is a matter of more money, that more money means more work, that there is only a fast track and a slow track, and that the fast track requires us to lay out huge effort for huge rewards. We worry about how we’re doing, we work more than we want, we buy more than we can value, and we cut ourselves off from the simple joys of romantic love, family, friends, and abundant time.”
Therefore, I implore you to think twice this “Holiday Season” (Read: Ridiculous Mindless Pavlov Dog Behavior), to take this GUARANTEED INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY:
