Efrain Martinez @martefrain: alot of people are in debt. where you ever in so much debt? how did you get out of it?
ANSWER:
I’ve been in debt quite a bit. I paid for every semester of my college education with debt. It took ten years after I graduated before I paid back my student loan debt.
I’ve been in debt to the IRS, which was so painful and scary I felt like killing myself.
When I was dead broke and zero I had a $1.8mm mortgage I had to pay back and I couldn’t sell my house. It was 2001 and I lived four blocks from the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center.
Debt takes the music out of us. It slows down the dance we started life with. Our youth is slowly squeezed out of pores by the pressure and stress of the debt pressing down on us, squeezing each pimple until we bleed cash, life, love, music – all gone in time for this body to shed itself in disgrace.
I don’t have credit cards. And I don’t like people to do me favors because its hard for me to be in mental debt. I like to immediately know what I’m going to do for someone in return. Always ask the price of things. And the only thing you have, ultimately, to pay with is your freedom. How much freedom, how much of your 80 years on this planet, will be taken from you not only by demands on your cash but demands on your time, demands on returned favors, demands on your creativity.
My rules are: I always pay back personal debts.
And I’ve never not paid back a debt to a bank. But never is a long time and ultimately I pride my freedom over bureaucratic institutions that still continually rape the people of this country dry and leave them tied up and blindfolded in the back shed while they lustfully move onto the next victim.
The tide has come in and mortgage debt has been revealed to largely be a scam designed to enslave us. And student loan debt, backed by a very grateful government, has been specifically invented to turn our children into either soldiers or indentured servants. Either way they die. In one case in an explosion. In the other case a slow death that burns through their insides at three in the morning. I hope that doesn’t happen to my children.
The safest way to get out of debt, honestly, is to start a company.
Why start a company and not pay off little by little? Because little by little will never pay it back. And no matter how high your salary is it never seems like enough for basic needs. The only way is to get a CHUNK of money. You get a chunk of money by selling a company. Then you close your eyes and pay your debts first.
It’s painful but then you get what money delivers: financial freedom.