Stress Free Prosperity by Saving Money! Four Great Tools.

Below you will find the techniques we used to first, pay off all our debts except for our mortgage, second, to restructure our mortgage to save approximately $100,000 in mortgage interest, and third, a simple way to buy the things we always buy, but now at a huge discount!!  remember, "A penny saved is a penny earned." That's so true, isn't it?

 Everybody's situation is different, that much is a given.  The thing that is common is the main problem of too much debt taking all of our money each month, right?  That is an awful place to be, I know from experience.  With this comes missed bills, late fees, overdraft charges, harassing phone call and so on.  It's hard to create wealth under these circumstances! I was there in early 2018.  

 Then I discovered a radio host that has been around for decades. We found Dave Ramsey and his get debt free radio program!  My wife and I really never had discussed the bills in detail.  She bought what she wanted and I bought what I wanted.  We both paid certain bills as they came due.  What we didn't realize until getting on Dave's budgeting app, is that we were about to go bankrupt very soon if we didn't change quickly!

 So we jumped in and began the well known 7 Baby Step program Dave Ramsey teaches and used his free budgeting app to make sense of all our bills.  I wont reteach the baby steps here, Dave does that much better anyways.  

 We were fortunate to have a home for sale that brought us a chunk of equity to dump on our "debt snowball" as Dave calls it, although it took discipline to not buy more things with it. Then after a year or so we were able to say, "We're Debt Free!" (excluding the mortgage).  

 I strongly recommend Dave's system.  We bought his course and put it to great use.  Check him out on YouTube video or your local talk radio station. UPDATE! We now have our Home Paid off with 3 cars and a boat! Zero debt! We use a credit card to pay bills and pay it off every month. This earns us 2% cash back too!

This will probably shock many of you, like it did us when we first saw it.  We thought we would be crazy to do something so different from everyone else, for goodness sake, our banker had never even heard of anyone doing this in the 26 years she did home mortgages! True story.   Dave Ramsey isn't a fan of this either because without discipline, people could get in trouble.

 After doing our homework and asking a ton of questions, we realized we could continue making our 30 year fixed mortgage payment monthly and reducing our mortgage balance by about $200 per month after interest charges, or we could get smart, and reduce it about $1,500-$2000 per month, and possibly pay off our house in less than 5 years!  Here's the short version.  There are many people teaching the plan on YouTube.  As a matter of caution, some are trying to charge $4995 to people to assist them in this plan. I RAN from them as soon as I heard that!  You can get much help for free online.  We did join a community of people being coached by some great guys for $497.  It was worth it to me to have the encouragement and coaching. Besides, I will save 10's of thousands in interest.  GET PROFESSIONAL ADVICE.

Ok, we took our 1st mortgage (30 year fixed rate) with 29 years left, and paid it off with a "1st position Home Equity Line Of Credit". (HELOC).  Now, the HELOC isn't that rare. Many have them in the 2nd position.  The rarity is the 1st position.  Most bankers don't know about these yet!

THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS a "Home Equity Loan", so be careful what you say.

The benefits we saw are:

  1. ALL the money we have in savings, and any money we get paid for any reason is paid into the HELOC loan to reduce the average daily balance. That reduces the interest owed each month. 

  2. This is a type of simple interest, rather than normal compounding interest. reducing the amount of interest owed.

  3.  You can use the money in the HELOC anytime you want to for paying bills or any other reason (within your draw period) with a HELOC debit card or check!  This is limited by each lender.  Ours is a 10 year draw period with a 30 year repayment period.  we should be completely paid off well before 10 years!

  4.  We received a introductory interest rate for the first year much less than our current rate.  It does go up after that and is adjustable based on the prime rate movement.  After careful calculation, we determined that if the rate were to go sky high, we still would come out much better with the HELOC.

  5.  The best part is, we could pay it off in about 5 years rather than the original 29 years, while saving around $100,000 in interest over the term of the regular mortgage!

This is enough to get you thinking.  Do your research for yourself.  Your situation may be completely different than mine was.  Get competent counsel. 

  I will put a link to the group that we joined below.  They have a great HELOC calculator giveaway and lots of free content on YouTube.  We did upgrade to paid members later.  Good luck!  UPDATE: We sold our last home and now live in a paid off home and are debt free!

We are excited about an amazing discount membership we have been using since June 2019.  When we initially joined it was primarily on travel and vacation services.  We used it right away, more than once, and saved a lot of money on a vacation to the mountains and later to Atlanta, GA..  They have resort condos worldwide that may cost others over $1000 per week, but we get deals like $299 per week!  So we really love it!  

  BUT NOW, for our USA members, this same great discount membership also includes just about anything else your already buying. Thus, saving you a ton of money everyday!  Some examples would be cars, insurance, legal services, clothes, pet supplies, electronics, gym memberships, etc.

UPDATE! Now they also offer Bill Negotiation Services and affordable health care plans with a zero deductible for the members too!  Our members can refer businesses to these services and earn a commission too! We save about $3000 annually on our healthcare plan!

The average family using this Discount Marketplace Membership has been saving $4900 per year!  That's over $400 each month on average!  Saving money is as good as earning money, maybe even better because they don't tax you for getting an amazing price on something like they do on earnings.  Oh, by the way, The memberships start at $20 a month!

Many of my friends have wanted this too, so I've put the link below.  We love this membership so much we became associates to share it with others too! That is optional though, and does not cost anything more than the normal membership.  See the amazing savings video below!