Paying Off Debt the Sustainable Way
The Jesse Mecham Show
YNAB
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jesse is taking a break for the summer, so Ben and Ernie (from the Budget Nerds podcast) are stepping in to guest host. Today, they talk about paying off debt... sustainably! So many personal finance resources urge people to pay off debt as soon as they can, and white knuckle their way toward financial freedom. While this can work for short periods of time, for many people paying off debt is a marathon, not a sprint, and white-knuckling has many pitfalls.
For one, when you're throwing every dollar and focusing all of your energy on paying off debt, it's easy to ignore Rule Two -- embracing your true expenses. If you get hit by an unplanned expense and you've thrown all your extra cash at your debt, then you may find yourself reaching for the credit card... and thereby accruing more debt. So, Ben and Ernie urge you to take things a little slower. Work the Four Rules, budget for true expenses, and have some cash reserves set aside, so that your journey to pay off debt doesn't start going backwards.
And more importantly, taking things at your own pace can help you avoid burnout and stay focused on the long term goal. As long as you are aligning your money with your priorities, you are doing it right!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Weinabbers. My name is Ernie with another episode of the Weinab podcast where we will |
| 0:10.3 | teach you four rules to help you stop living paycheck to paycheck. Get out of debt and |
| 0:15.3 | save more money. And I'm here with budget nerds co-host Ben. Ben, welcome to Jesse's podcast. |
| 0:24.7 | Hey, hello. Why are we here? Why is this thought Jesse? What's going on? Jesse's out for the |
| 0:31.1 | summer or a little bit of the summer. And we're going to be taking over. |
| 0:36.9 | Taking over the pod. So if you don't know who we are, we're Ben and Ernie. We make a show called |
| 0:42.6 | budget nerds. Part of the Weinab podcast family. So if you haven't checked it out, just you're |
| 0:48.6 | listening to a podcast right now, maybe if you're driving like pullover, look up budget nerds |
| 0:55.2 | on whatever you're listening to right now, go ahead and subscribe. Give us a little listen, |
| 1:00.8 | but we're going to be short and sweet for Jesse's podcast here because we go 45 minutes over |
| 1:07.2 | our show, but that doesn't cut it over here. Yeah, yeah. And Ben, have you ever, when you were a |
| 1:11.9 | kid, did you ever go to your dad's office or place of employment? I remember because that's what I |
| 1:18.4 | feel like right now. I would go to my dad's job. I would go to his office and he had like a real |
| 1:24.6 | office. It wasn't a cube. Like it was a real office with this big desk. And I just remember |
| 1:30.3 | feeling, whoa, this is what an adult feels like. That's what I kind of feel like being on Jesse's |
| 1:38.1 | podcast. I love it. Yeah. So we're we're filling the big shoes today. But I think we want to |
| 1:46.1 | talk about something that, well, it's a mainstay in this podcast. Let's talk about debt. Let's talk |
| 1:50.8 | about paying off debt. But we're going to take a bit of a different angle, right, Ernie? Yeah. |
| 1:55.0 | We're going to be talking about sustainability. We did a podcast on the budget nerd show a number of |
| 2:00.1 | episodes ago where we focused on paying off debt without all the guilt. I think generally when |
| 2:07.0 | people think about paying off their debt, they think about getting super aggressive, right? Like |
| 2:12.8 | really scaling back their lifestyles to the bare bones and putting every extra penny towards |
... |
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