Debt Elimination Success Seminar
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Section 1
A Look at Debt
History of Debt
Credit Card History
Current State of Debt
How You Got Into Debt
Good Debt Bad Debt
Business vs. Personal Debt
Section 2 Dealing With Your Money
The Two Step Plan
Doing The Two-Step
Step One
Step Two
The Paths Out of Debt
1- Create a Debt Payment Plan
2- Neogtiate Better Rates & Terms
a.Consolidation Loans
b.Consumer Credit Counseling Services
3- Negotiate Lump-Sum Settlements
4- Bankruptcy
5- The Easy Way
6- Win $1,000,000
Living Debt-Free
Manage Your Money
Make More Money
Save Money
SameMoney-MoreFun
Stay Debt-Free
You as a Business
Section 3 Dealing With Your Creditors
Alerts/Scams
The Credit Industry
Credit Industry
The Fine Print
The Secondary Debt Market
The Debt Collection Process
Original Creditor
The Charge-Off
Collection Agency
Legal Problems
Dirty Creditor Tricks
Dealing with Debt Collectors
Dealing with Debt Collectors
Statute of Limitations
Cease and Desist Letter
Section 4
The Credit Report
The Credit Report
Credit Score
Credit Repair
Section 5
Dealing With Yourself
The Critical Factor
The Art of Prosperity
The End of Failure
Prosperity Coaching
Section 6
Kids and Money
Kids and Money
How to Pay for College
Section 7
Debt Information
Bookstore
Debt Facts
Radio Show
Resources
About Us
Privacy Policy
Site Map
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Prosperity Coaching |
Host: Tom Allen
Guest: Paula Langguth Ryan
Segment 3
Tom: I’m Tom Allen, and I hate debt. I invite you to make the decision today to join with me in living a debt-free and prosperous life. While getting out of debt isn’t rocket science, it does take a commitment to succeed. Paula Ryan, a highly successful prosperity coach and author of "Bounce Back from Bankruptcy", understands the importance of financial commitments, and she’s here to help you commit to a better life. Paula, there are going to be ups and downs on the path out of debt. You have seven commitments that will help us stay on the right path. Why are commitments, and why is having a commitment, so important in getting out and staying out of debt?
Paula: Having a commitment means you’ve set your sites on a course of action and that you’ve made the decision in your head to stick with it no matter what.
Tom: So it’s not really, “You know, I think getting out of debt is a good idea, maybe I’ll try that sometime…”
Paula: Yes, “that’s going to be one of my New Year’s Resolutions this year, I’m going to get out of debt.” And then you look back and realize that was your New Year’s Resolution for the last fourteen years.
Tom: Yeah, and those usually last until January 2nd.
Paula: Well, maybe the 3rd, when you see something really nice while you’re making returns from Christmas or Hanukkah and it’s just a little bit more than what you’re returning.
Tom: Give us an idea of how commitment works and what your seven commitments are.
Paula: I actually want to talk about the seven commitments to heal my relationship with money, but we’ll talk about that in the next segment. I also have seven debt-free commitments. The first is an oxymoron to I Hate Debt, which is “Embrace Your Debt”. Recognize that it has a special role in your life. If you had not gotten into debt, you wouldn’t now be paying closer attention to your money, you wouldn’t have worked to become a better money manager, and you wouldn’t be getting clearer about what financial security actually means to you, what’s important about what you want to be doing with your money. You would not be making conscious choices about your money now if you hadn’t gotten into debt. So embrace your debt—that’s number one.
Tom: Got it. We tend to dissociate ourselves to help the pain, but as you say, the debt has added some benefits to us, and in order to fully attach ourselves to it and to get rid of it, we’re going to have to own up to our current situation.
Paula: Right! You have to recognize that you had a role in this. Next, make the commitment to yourself that nothing will make you take on new debt today. Just today. And that’s a hard one, because people always think, “What if an emergency comes?” If you make that commitment, that nothing’s going to make you take on new debt today, then you’re going to think outside the box when something happens. If your car breaks down and you’re a salesperson, you think, “I need a credit card because if my car breaks down, how am I going to clients?” You’ll start thinking, “Who do I know that’s interested in learning sales?” and you call that person up and say, “You can shadow me today. You drive.” Or if you do bookkeeping, you find a mechanic that needs bookkeeping. Or here’s something anybody can do: walk into the mechanic’s office, look around, see the grunge, and say, “I will clean your place from top to bottom if you fix my transmission.”
Tom: Getting into debt is so easy and that’s one of the problems. I would say that if you absolutely had an emergency and there was absolutely no other way, or perhaps if you wanted to go to college and improve yourself, and there was absolutely no other way… But generally, there are other ways, and we have to look for them first.
Paula: I think that’s part of the problem that comes up, and this brings us to number three: people have a misconception that you can’t buy things with cash, that there’s no way for you to go to college on cash or on scholarships, there’s no way for you to buy a car or a home nowadays on cash. But that is actually false. I know lots of people who do it, and they aren’t people who are making a tremendous amount of money; they are people who are thinking outside the box. You know, you get three friends together who are paying you rent, you can buy a house with cash.
Tom: So you would put cash on the down payment, and then have your renters make the monthly payments for you.
Paula: That’s right. And those people have renters or have someone in their property who is not making enough to pay all of the taxes and the interest and the principal and all the maintenance and all that. But if you are willing to give up the privacy of “this is my home and I must live in it alone”, then there are ways that you can buy your own home, and pay it off much more quickly, and be done with it.
Tom: It really comes down, in my opinion, to creative thinking.
Paula: Yes! It’s thinking outside the box.
Tom: And that comes back to the commitment: “I am not going to take on new debt today.”
Paula: Just today. Okay, school may be in the future and you may have to deal with a student loan—but that’s not today.
Tom: But the interesting thing about tomorrow is, once it gets here, it’s today.
Paula: (laughs) Don’t tell anybody. It’s our secret. And once you start making that commitment in your head about this misconception, then you start to change your language. I’m actually in Minneapolis tomorrow doing a huge day-long event to help people do this with their beliefs and I actually have 12 words and phrases to eliminate, and I’m going to give you a couple examples.
Tom: Okay.
Paula: Replace phrases like “we can’t afford that” with “I’m choosing to spend my money on something else.”
Tom: I’m so glad you brought this up because I’ve been struggling with this all week. In how we phrase what is the obvious. If you only have two dollars in your pocket, and your child or somebody says, “Let’s buy this for $10”, the absolute truth is “I don’t have the money to buy that.” But it doesn’t serve us well when rearranging our thoughts toward debt.
Paula: The truth is that you may think it’s a stupid toy or you think they’re going to break it in ten minutes, or you may think it’s an ugly thing your wife wants to buy for the living room, so you say, “We can’t afford that.” But then you go out and buy a $400 sander and she says, “Wait a minute, I thought we couldn’t afford that” and you say, “But it’s a sander!” So just tell the microscopic truth about your finances, which is “I’m choosing to spend my money somewhere else.”
Tom: I’m choosing to spend my money somewhere else.
Paula: Right. Affirm that you are making a conscious choice about where you’re spending your money. There’s no good or bad choice with money, it’s just where you’re choosing to spend it. But honor the choice. “I had to pay for the new brake job or the new refrigerator.” You didn’t HAVE to pay for the new refrigerator or whatever; you chose to do that. I used to live out in the country and my well went out and it was going to cost me $4000 to replace the well because mine was a very old, shallow well. And I thought, “I don’t have four grand right now, what am I going to do?” And I chose to ask each of my neighbors if I could tap into their well. One of them was there only twice a year and said, “Oh yeah, just hook your garden hose up to our well house and run it into your pump house. Next thing I know, I’ve got running water in my house while I saved fast and furiously to come up with enough money for a new well.
Tom: Isn’t that great! It came out of a necessity, but it also came about because you asked.
Paula: Yeah, I didn’t say I can’t afford this or I’m going to have to charge this. “Hey, it was an emergency, I’ve got to charge it.” No, for three days we schlepped water in buckets and then we got a hold of these folks, who were gracious enough to say “Absolutely” and for three months, we lived off their well. You know, you do what you need to do.
Tom: Super.
Paula: Also, stop saying things like, “I’m broke”. You’re not broke, you’re not poor. You are “temporarily cash-strapped”. It’s a temporary situation, not something that’s permanent.
Tom: How about saying something like, “I will be buying this at a later date.”
Paula: Yes! “This isn’t something I want to spend my money on today. I may choose to spend it on this tomorrow, but not today.” You make that choice yourself.
Tom: Yes, just the idea of not saying “I don’t have money” (even if you really don’t have money, and that’s the real trick to this)… As Zig Ziglar would say, you are telling the truth in advance. “I have the money for this—next week.”
Paula: “I’m going to pay for it another time. It’s not something I am going to buy today. And commitment number five is, send at least one creditor something every month.
Tom: Okay.
Paula: If you want to be serious about getting out of debt, send one creditor something every month. Jay Abraham, a master marketer, used to be a credit collector and he was actually very good at getting accounts paid. Here’s what he did: he was always nice, he would call and say, “Hi, Mrs. So-and-So, I know you have a debt with us, and I was just wondering if it’s possible if you could just send us five dollars today?” And they were like, “What??” because they were expecting “five hundred dollars today”. And if they said no, he would say, “Well, do you happen to have a dollar handy? If you can put that dollar in an envelope, address it with my address and your account number, when I get it, I’m going to call you and tell you that we’ve received it and that it’s been credited to your account.”
Tom: Well, I do want to add a word of caution here, because if your debt is past the statute of limitations or perhaps about to go past the statute of limitations, then if you pay them even one dollar, it resets the statute of limitations and will allow them to sue you, which many collectors whom I talk to use that trick.
Paula: Oh yes, but I’m talking about debts that are newly late. He was trying to get folks to start paying something on their debt. But if it’s an old debt, do not start sending small amounts if you know for sure how long you’ve got till that debt falls off your credit report.
Tom: And I would also say, give a dollar or more to a worthy charity as well.
Paula: There you go. Now number six is another attitude thing, which is a biggie: people have blocks to receiving. The trick is to stop seeing gifts as having strings attached, because any string you see attached is a string you’ve put on it. You decide that this person has an attachment to how you use the gift they gave you. And also, stop seeing people giving you things as people giving you charity. Start practicing just saying “Thank you.” Practice receiving, say thank you. And if you feel uncomfortable with what they’re giving you, you ask one simple question that gives them an out. You say, “Are you sure?” Don’t say, “That’s way too much.” Just say, “Are you sure?” That gives them the chance to say, “Oh you’re right, I can’t buy dinner tonight, let’s go dutch because I have to pick up groceries on the way home.
Tom: And one way to get comfortable with receiving, and I’ll go back to what I said earlier, is to be comfortable with giving. In our next segment, we’re going to be talking more about artofabundance.com, Paula Ryan, what she can do for you, and how to heal your relationship with money. So stay tuned, Paula Ryan will be right back. For more information on getting out and staying out of debt, visit IHateDebt.com. I’m Tom Allen, and I hate debt.
Read the transcript of Paula's next segment Heal Your Relationship With Money
Paula Ryan
Seven Debt-Free Commitments
If you find this information helpful I ask you to contribute $1 (or more) to help me help more people. You can contribute using PayPal using this button
Or you can mail in your contribution.