The Pill to Cure Debt

Would you agree that taking a pill to cure us has become ingrained into our trips to the doctor?  When we’re in pain or sick we hope there’s a pill we can to make our troubles disappear.

Sometimes it’s possible and the little purple, yellow, or pink pill our doctor prescribes us does make us feel better… at least for a while.  But many times the pills we find only treat the symptoms of our underlying illness or pain. 

The pills are great for short term relief or for getting our symptoms under control but when we stop taking them the same nasty pain creeps back into our nerve endings.

Disease of Debt

Obviously debt is a “man-made disease”.  There’s no virus or gene that determines whether you’ll go into debt.  Some people end up in debt as a result of their own decisions, others find themselves broke due to an illness or accident.

However we get into debt, there are tools that can temporarily help us shuffle our cash and pay our bills to stay afloat another month.  These tools are our “debt pills” but unfortunately, they only treat our symptoms.  Cash advances, pay day loans, credit cards, home equity loans, or money borrowed from friends and family help us get by but they don’t address the root cause of our debt.

In fact, some times these “debt pills” come with such high interest rates that we’re actually worse off after we absorb the pills than we were before.

Temporary Relief

Fortunately, I can say we haven’t been in that position when it comes to debt but I have faced my share of medical “magical pills”.  Usually the way it plays out is that I’ll have some problem that’s being caused by behavior (posture, eating habits, repetitive stress, etc). I’ll spend money to go see the doctor and have tests done and buy medicine.  The medicine will help but when it’s gone, if I haven’t changed my behavior, the pain will still be sticking around.

In reality, it takes a while to “fix” whatever I’m doing that is causing me the pain.  Debt’s the same way, it’s not something that you can cure overnight.  Even if someone gave you enough money to pay off your debt it wouldn’t necessarily be “cured”.  You’d be free of it for a while but if the source of the debt wasn’t taken care of then eventually it could surface again.

A Family in Debt

I know a family who learned this lesson the hard way several years ago, the Baker family.  They found themselves pretty deep in consumer debt and finally realized that popping debt pills wasn’t helping, they needed to attack the source of the debt.  So they sold almost everything they owned, went through a major mental transformation, and focused most of their energy on paying down their debt.

A few years back the dad (Adam) actually started up a blog to write about their battle with debt and called it Man vs Debt.  Now that the Baker’s have paid off all their consumer debt and pay cash for everything, Adam is on a quest to help others win their struggle with debt.

You vs Debt

Adam just released a course called You vs Debt that walks you through the steps of beating your debt, the same steps that he and his wife went through to pay off the money they owed.  Since they were figuring it out as they went along, it took them over a year to pay it down.  Now since they’ve “been there, done that” now they share everything they learned so that others in debt can squash the “debt pill” mentality and get thiers paid off much faster.

It’s a pretty cool story, here’s a video where he talks about the debt they were in and how they were borrowing from one credit card to make payments on a different card (you have to scroll down a bit to get to the video).  I think it’s pretty brave of him and Courtney to be so open about their mistakes and that they invested so much of themselves in creating a course to help others beat their debt.

So if you’re struggling with debt, definitely check out You vs Debt to hear their story and see how they beat their debt.

Ben Edwards, the founder of Money Smart Life, saved up enough to buy a Nintendo back when he was 12 years old. When he used the money to buy shares of Wal-Mart stock instead, he knew he wasn't like the other kids... His addiction to personal finance has paid off for his family and now he's helping you to afford the life that you want. Check him out on the web at Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook.

All posts by Ben Edwards