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If you’re a guy like me, we tend to get fired up about a new pursuit, an idea, or a project. You hear about something cool, and you drop everything and dive in. This is me:

• Tomorrow lets change ALL the light bulbs in the house to LED!
• Babe we totally need to start composting!
• From now on, I’m cutting my own hair!

Or some version of the above. My wife has been along for a few of those, now she’s learned to shrug them off and let them run their course. She knows that after the initial excitement and maybe a few hours or dollars invested gung-ho into this new thing….I lose interest. It fades into the sunset. A couple bulbs get changed, we maybe start to separate plastic bottles from regular trash, and I buy a set of clippers and never use them.

The day I had my “origin story,” I came home all FIRED. UP. to pay off my student loans. Would the excitement stick, or would it fade away? Too soon to tell. The first thing I had to do was to get a lay of the land. How much did I owe? I actually knew that figure, from a spreadsheet I had started with the four loan servicers, and the four remaining balances. It was 58k. (yikes. It hurt to stare at that number!) What I wasn’t tracking though, was any debt besides student loans, or what things looked like on my wife’s side of the equation. (definitely a post coming up on how to have THAT conversation!) Because I was fired up, I quickly gathered up my other debts – a 401k loan and a car loan, 3k and 9k for a total of 12k. 70k when you add it to the student loans. Adding my wife’s credit cards and student loans was relatively simple, fortunately, and we were renting so mortgage was not a factor.

The first step in moving to pay off your debt is to make a list of what you owe. We used Excel, but a Word doc or even a hand-written list would do. (no judgment) Log into each loan servicer’s account that you send payments to each month and see what’s left: student loans, cars and other motor vehicles, furniture, credit cards, electronics, private loans you made directly with family/friends, all of it. Get the total of those debts and look at it. Double-check you got everything, and really understand the full picture. Since we used Excel, we could create a pie chart to really see it:

After seeing this number, it was hard to stay fired up, to be honest. It was hard to believe that I hadn’t BEEN in college in over ten years, but I was still paying for it. I still wanted to get rid of it as fast as humanly possible, but now it was really starting to sink in just what it was going to take. Having it in front of you allows you to do some simple math, OK, if I pay $1,000 a month, thats 80 months. Over 6.5 years? No thank you, I don’t want this around in 6 years. $2,000 a month, still over 3 years. Better, but still a bummer – the anchor around my neck is heavier than it’s ever felt, and I want to get rid of it FAST. And who wants to go through the required budget cuts to free up 2k a month to just send it to a loan company?

It was about this time that I started searching for help online. “How to pay off debt”? There were a few sites I sifted through, My Money Wizard being one I visited often. Eventually he posted about all of HIS favorite financial blogs, and after sifting through some of those, a common denominator to all of their origins emerged: Dave Ramsey. That’s where I found the steps that my wife and I would follow for the next year of our lives while we undid the financial damage of the previous 14. I would need to stay fired up to handle what was coming.