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A door keeps turning on its hinges,

And the lazy one on his bed.

Proverbs 26:14

I love the Proverbs! It impresses me how they apply to modern day life just as well as they did when written thousands of years ago. I included this one to highlight that hard work is a major ingredient in tackling your debt. In general, discipline is developed by doing hard things, and giving yourself a debt-free future can be hard at times.

It’s especially difficult to keep up the discipline as the timeline over which you’re doing it extends. If you’ve lined up your debts and started your snowball, you’ve likely already figured out your debt payoff timeline. “If I pay ‘this much’ to my debt per month, I will be debt free in ‘this many months’. Depending on your shovel to hole ratio, that figure may make you cringe. When times get tough, revisit your why.

Your hole is the amount of debt you have, and your shovel is the portion of your income you’re able to devote to debt payoff. The bigger your shovel, (looking at you, right side of image) the FASTER you’ll be able to fill that hole. Speed is key because without momentum, it will be hard to continue making the sacrifices you planned out. We found that when we really got rolling in our payoff period, we found a ton of ways to speed it up even more, actually beating our target date by a month. At this point hopefully your hole isn’t getting bigger, you’ve stopped increasing your debt, so that leaves you with the shovel size to work with. Note to self – piles of brown dirt and the poop emoji look the same!

Ways to increase your shovel size

Your income is your income, for now. I’m not suggesting to go out and get another job. But if you want to increase your pace, here are some ways you can allocate more of your dollars to debt payoff.

Reduce expenses

Reducing any of “the big three” expenses – housing, transportation, and food – will move the needle the quickest in this area. Together, these three alone often represent 50-70% of the average American household expenses (close to 70% for us). Because there’s some up-front work with moving, and changing/eliminating your car, of those three the one that tends to be the most immediately actionable is food. A basic area where I managed to cut down my expenses during the debt payoff was to stop eating out for lunch during the week. As difficult as it was to no longer dine at Chipotle every other day, it was a great move for me. Benefits of doing this:

1. Economic – $50+ per week in M-F lunch costs went down to around $30 by buying bagged salad kits and topping it with grilled chicken or salmon.
2. Time & Stress – leaving the job to go grab lunch, fighting the lunch crowds, and anxiously checking my watch to make sure I got back by the time the trades resumed, or before a 1pm meeting were a thing of the past. I was more productive eating at my desk when I needed to, or I was able to use the time for personal use or relaxing a bit with co-workers.
3. Health – trading daily CMG steak, rice & bean bowls piled with cheese and a side of chips for a salmon salad rich in Omega 3’s and low in carbs? Win. I’ve since traded the bag salad kits and the dressing I would just throw away for bagged baby spinach, further bringing the cost down.

Could you cut down your expenses in any of “the big three”?

Sell Stuff

Before Marie Kondo hit Netflix, I tapped into the double benefit of going through all my stuff – tidying up, AND selling it online. I sold things with some value that I hadn’t touched in over a year, including old iPads, laptops, guitars and amps. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

I advertised on eBay and Craiglist, posting my unused, unwanted clutter like prized swine at the county fair. I had never sold anything on eBay before, and I must admit it was pretty exciting to watch the bidders bid up the price of the items in the waning minutes and seconds. On those nights you could hear me yelling “Go, adrian14886!!! Are you just going to let him take it CallMeMissy912???”

“Sell it on eBay” – such a simple suggestion, a wonder it’s not the instant fix-all for everyone with clutter. Why isn’t it? Because as we all know, there are barriers to entry which must be overcome – like dusting off the item, staging and taking good pictures of it, writing a description, managing the posting and buyer questions, and ultimately packaging it up and shipping it, possibly even to the dreaded post office (the worst place). But since you’re motivated and fired up to improve your finances and your life, what of those steps is actually difficult? None. I ended up netting around $600 from selling my items, and put it right towards the debt snowball those months. Plus I improved my eBay rating! Another idea for the less digitally inclined is to hold a garage sale, even combining efforts with friends, and making an event out of it. A little practice dealing with hagglers might help the next time you need to negotiate a price!

What creative ways can you think to increase the size of your shovel?