Financial Freedom By Breaking The Rules

Posted on December 18, 2008
Filed Under Finance, Social-Issues | Leave a Comment

Just about every book on personal finance you can find today will talk about many of the “financial rules”.

There are many that we have been taught as well as picked up along the way. The startling truth about many of these financial rules is that some of them are wrong.

The financial rules can be deadly to your chance of ever achieving real financing independence in your desired time-frame. Two major “financial rules” that are the most difficult to break free from are the principles of “Saving Money” and “Developing a Good Credit Score”.

Saving Money.

Every time you get conventional financial advice, it usually tells you to save up a nest egg on the side while you go through life.

Many so-called authorities will counsel you to save 10 percent of your income as investment for your future.

They call it “Paying Yourself First.”

Now, just so that you understand me, this is not bad advice. It’s just the way it’s often used causes people to slowly move toward their goals of living debt-free.

Rather than take the fast lane, this route forces you to stay in the slow lane.

Let me explain…

Being efficient starts with focusing on one task at a time. When you start saving 10% of your income, in addition to getting rid of your credit-card debt, it will only slow you down.

This strategy is a proven fast track to getting rid of debt – even your mortgage. The strategy is to FIRST eliminate debt and THEN save. In other words, after you pay back the money you owe, then you can go ahead and “pay yourself first.”

Another way of saying it is to go ahead and pay yourself first… and your best investment in yourself is to pay off unpaid debt balances.

Developing a Good Credit Score.

Believe it or not, you shouldn’t care about your credit scores.
Why? Because you shouldn’t ever need. You probably rely too heavily on credit, and you don’t know how to control credit rather than let it control you.

A word of warning! I’m not advocating bad credit. So many things in our lives are dictated by our credit score – jobs, insurance, interest rates, etc. I want you to be respectful of your credit history.

However, our obsession with our credit rating is because so many of us Americans were never taught to be responsible in our use of credit. No one taught us about how to use credit responsibly and therefore, I, like thousands of other people, quickly racked up credit card debt.

We became slaves to keeping up with the Jones as well as to the Madison Avenue advertisers and the money-lending companies behind them.

What type of car you should finance? What types of clothes you should wear? What kinds of vacations you should take? Where should you live? Are you chasing the American Dream or has the American Dream chased you?

If you can’t afford a luxury car, why drive yourself into debt by buying one?

Only when you have no debt will you be insulated from layoffs, economic downturns, inflation and many other woes that leave us vulnerable when we rely too heavily on a company for our financial survival. Get out of debt and live free from conventional “financial rules”.

Interested in discovering more about living financially free? Ben Shaffer is one of the leading debt management experts. To find out more his unique debt-free methods, visit http://www.emergencydebtplans.com

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