221: Hard Decisions Leading to a $170k Debt Payoff (During Covid)

BiggerPockets Money Podcast

BiggerPockets

Education, Investing, Business

4.5 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2021

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Darius Smith always knew how to make money, but wasn’t very good at saving it. Growing up, he had jobs ranging from delivering phone books, to running paper routes, to even putting up eviction notices on homes. He opened his first bank account when he was around nine years old! So how did Darius end up with almost $170,000 in debt? An even better question may be, how did Darius pay off all that debt in only a few years? Darius spent time at multiple different colleges, racking up $40,000 in student debt, then buying a Mustang, paying for a wedding, putting some charges on credit cards, and finally combining his wife’s debt with his. They started to use the “debt snowball” method, but after having to take out business loans, the debt grew even more. This is when Darius decided that he and his wife needed a plan to conquer their finances. They moved into a friend’s extra room for cheaper rent, stopped going out as much, began working more than one job, and siphoned all the money they could into savings and debt payoff. As of July 2021, they are debt-free! In This Episode We Cover How to prepare to take on student debt (when needed) Avoiding lifestyle creep and finding ways to lower your expenses The “reverse house hack” and renting a room for far cheaper living expenses Mortgage forbearance and student loan forbearance in 2021 “Isolating yourself” from friends or influences that will cause you to spend more Having a money date with your partner and going over finances regularly And So Much More! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Money Facebook Group BiggerPockets Forums Finance Review Guest Onboarding Scott's Instagram Mindy's Twitter Get Tickets to BPCon 2021 Net Worth Calculator Debt Pay Off Plan 6 Month Spending Tracker Sinking Funds Tracker Lifetime Earnings Calculator BiggerPockets Money Podcast 121 with Seth Jones BiggerPockets Money Podcast 73 with Ramit Sethi BiggerPockets Money Podcast 127 with Ramit Sethi Check the full show notes here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/moneyshow221 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Bigger Pogets Money Podcast, show number 221, where we interview Darius Smith
0:05.1	and talk about being conscious of your finances. Hey, I found this FI thing and I'm also interested
0:13.2	in personal finance. I need you to like not spend any money so we can like budget and figure
0:18.0	our lives out. So that was a process to get that like through one year through the other.
0:24.5	Hello, hello, hello, my name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my forward thinking cohost
0:29.5	Scott Trent. You're always in front of us with these new adjectives to describe you Mindy. Thank you so
0:34.1	much. Scott and I are here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else.
0:41.2	To introduce you to every money story because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for
0:45.9	everyone no matter when or where you're starting. That's right. Whether you want to retire early
0:49.7	and travel the world going to make big time investments in assets like real estate, start your own
0:53.2	business or claw your way out of debt and back to zero will help you reach your financial goals
0:57.3	and get money out of the way so you can launch yourself towards those dreams.
1:11.2	Scott, I am so excited to introduce Daria Smith to our listeners. I love his story. It starts out
1:18.5	kind of the same as everybody else's. I had some debt and then I paid it off. But what I really
1:23.4	love about his journey is that he is conscious of his money and conscious of his spending and
1:30.5	conscious of his investing and conscious of his financial situation all the time. And that really
1:37.6	does make the difference between financial success and financial unsuccessful, which is a word.
1:44.6	Yeah, I think he made a lot of decisions that put him and his wife in the hole years ago.
1:51.8	And in the last couple of years have really has really I think I've taken a very sophisticated
1:57.6	fundamentals based approach to navigating his way out of money and then compounded that
2:03.0	in the whole situation is a very nuanced but I think intelligent navigation of the COVID situation.
2:10.3	How do you handle COVID when you've got moving parts of multiple parts of debt, new jobs, moves
	...

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