Hello, Wine Ebers, my name is Jesse Meekham, this is podcast number 138 for you need a budget where we teach you four rules to help you stop living paycheck to paycheck, get out of debt and save more money. Why get out of debt? Good debt, bad debt, just finished up a blog post about that.

But what is it about debt that maybe is missed? What negative do we maybe miss? Yes, it takes a bite of your cash flow and paying interest isn't fun or anything like that, but there are plenty of people that'll give very

mathematical and very logical explanations as to why debt is okay why debt could even be good

debt and we talked a little bit about that. I was thinking this week what is it

that sits wrong with me about sometimes even the good debt. And it really ends up coming back to a principle of Rule 1.

If Rule 1 is to give every dollar a job, we create for ourselves a zero-based budget where if you do

something here you may not be able to do something over there.

And if you add money there, you've got to take it from somewhere else.

What Rule 1 does is allow you to prioritize your dollars,

obviously, and everyone's priorities are different, obviously.

But there's an underlying benefit of Rule 1 that is overlooked,

and that zero-based budgeting accentuates this benefit. The benefit is scarcity, and a lot of times people will think of scarcity as a big negative.

Something scary, something that they don't want, we don't like scarcity.

Scarcity is scary. Scarcity is bothersome. You've got to

pinch or save or just try and eke by because things are scarce but the fact the matter is

scarcity creates or allows you to start to think outside the box a little bit.

When you're dealing with a situation

where you have scarce resources

and you have no other option,

but the fact that resources are scarce, your mind's unleashed. And all sorts of interesting, cool things can happen. Assumptions kind of fall away. Habits that you've had or crushed as new habits are formed,

because you're dealing with a reality that scarcity has basically accentuated for you.

When we borrow, we don't have to live by that rule. Nothing is

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