Personal Debt/Goals/Accomplishments

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ceeboo
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Personal Debt/Goals/Accomplishments

Post by ceeboo »

Hey all,

Table setting: I grew up in a very lower middle class family. When I left the nest after graduating high school, I dropped out of a local community college (twice) and had many lower paying jobs before I got into sales. Sales is what I have been doing for the last 30 years. I should also mention, because it played a major factor in what I will describe below, that I had a horrific gambling problem for decades until about 3 years ago.

It was about 3 years ago that my gorgeous wife and I decided that we wanted to get out of our personal debt that we accumulated over many years. When we first began discussing this, we wrote out all of our debt (not including the mortgage) and we were stunned by the number. This debt was credit cards, one car note, and one personal line of credit. In total, we had over $58,000.00 in personal debt. I understand that this number wouldn't be concerning to many - it's all relative to income and such - but to us, this was a big number and we felt a little overwhelmed and we were clearly seeing that we were slaves to these lenders. We wanted out! We wanted to be free!

So, over the past three years, we started working on this. I got a second job delivering Amazon packages and Whole Foods deliveries (Amazon owns Whole Foods) a couple of nights a week and on the weekends. My bride (who hadn't worked for over 15 years) landed a part time gig taking care of an elderly woman in her home near by. I still remember the first thing we paid off (Our plan was taking them from smallest balance first and hitting them as hard as we could until it was paid off before we moved to the next one in line) it was a Macy's credit card with a balance of a little more than $1,800.00. It tool bout 6 weeks before we wrote a check and paid this one off and it might sound strange, but it really felt good when we wrote that check. In some ways, it gave us a strong desire to tackle the next one in line - So we did - and we kept doing this, one by one over the course of about 3 years. A little less than 3 years actually.

In addition, we started paying attention to a household budget we wrote out (This was something we had never done before in our marriage - but probably should have.) So instead of eating out 3-4 times a week, we treated ourselves to eating out once a week. We also made some other small changes.

So, as of about 3 months ago, we were able to pay off this entire debt (a little over $58,000.00) and are now debt free (except for the house) - To not have to write out 18-20 or so checks a month is awesome! We are now working on hammering our retirement accounts (401k through the company I work for and a personal Roth IRA I recently set up) We are trying to play catch up as these things should have been put in place many moons ago.

One last thing, I remember thinking that we would never be able to do this - The number seemed to high. but once we started (and that, in my opinion, is the key - to just get started) it all seemed to work, and it worked much faster than I thought it would.

Next on the agenda for us is to try to eat better/healthier and start some sort of workout program (Starting slow, maybe walking every day or something until I can get my rusty bones moving again)

So, what goals and/or accomplishments are you working on or have you completed? Debt? Health? Education?
Marriage?
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Physics Guy
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Re: Personal Debt/Goals/Accomplishments

Post by Physics Guy »

Congratulations on really doing something.

I've lost nearly 30 pounds now over about 20 months of intermittent fasting. Most of that loss was in the first 15 months, and it was enough to get me into the "healthy" BMI range. It hasn't seemed to work as well to get the last ten pounds off and become teen-age lean; I suspect that for that I'm going to have to control the rest of my diet a bit more carefully and build up more muscle. But the method continues to work well for keeping the weight off, by trimming back down gains I make over holidays. It's a reliable enough tool that I'm confident I'll be able to keep that weight off for good.

I've been using the variant where you eat normally 5 days a week, but reduce to 600 calories a day for two days a week. It's basically dieting in short sprints rather than a long marathon, because I'm really hungry on the fasting days, but it's only a day and it feels as though I'm really doing something, so I can maintain motivation. I'd rather be starving two days a week than be hungry for months on end.

You have to keep the other five days of the week normal, and that means normal healthy days with balanced nutrition and no more than 2000-ish calories. You don't have to do a lot of calorie-counting or find a lot of diet recipes, though. I split up the 600 calories into three 200-calorie micro meals, and counting up to 200 calories is all too damn easy. I've found a handful of 200-calorie combos that I just repeat on the fasting days. On those days I'm so happy to have anything that I don't miss variety. There seems to be some good kind of spillover effect from the fasting days onto the normal days, in fact, in that I'm just more aware of what a healthy amount of food to eat is, I'm more content with a healthy amount of food and more motivated not to overdo it.

There's no woo in this kind of intermittent fasting. It simply cuts a lot of calories from the week—enough to lose roughly a pound a week on average in theory. In practice I've let it slide a few times for holidays, and there have been some plateaus, so my long-term average has been maybe only about half a pound per week, but there have also been some good months where every week dropped a pound pretty consistently.

At first I thought that calorie reduction was absolutely all that mattered, because calories in food are just way more than you can burn with exercise. Eventually I realised, though, that precisely because those 2000 calories a day of basic metabolism are such a big energy budget compared to exercise, anything you do to tweak your metabolism can make a big difference. I noticed that fasting with light regular exercise was considerably more effective than only fasting, even though the calorie cost of the exercise was negligible. My hypothesis is that if I don't exercise at all, my body responds to calorie reduction by going into an energy-conserving slug mode, rather than by consuming stored fat. Keeping up some activity seems to keep me out of slug mode and keep the weight loss on track. I don't really know if that even makes sense, but I can offer the anecdotal evidence that for me it seemed to help.

I also found it helpful to weigh myself every day, at about the same time of day, and keep track of my daily weight in a spreadsheet. My weight bounces up and down quite a bit from day to day, I find, so if I only weighed once a week I might overreact to the random luck of that day. I keep track each day, but pay no real attention to the daily values and only worry about the weekly average, which tends to average away the daily noise and show the steady trend.

I've also been following this strength training regimen Convict Conditioning. You can buy the book online. The schtick is that the author developed this regimen while in prison, where the weight room is controlled by gangs so you have to exercise without equipment in your cell. I'm not sure I believe the guy's story, but the program seems good because I can do it at home in a few minutes a day.

CC lays out just a few kinds of exercise, and for each kind of exercise it has a sequence of ten levels, starting from a baby version that anyone can do. It tells you when you're ready to move up to the next level in each exercise kind. Level 5 is basically the standard version of a chin-up or push-up or whatever, and level 10 is an iron-man version (like freaking one-arm chin-ups). At this point level 6 is in sight for me for four of the six kinds of exercise; the other two kinds are advanced ones that you're not even supposed to start until you're at 6 or 7 on the basic four.

I'd recommend the program because it doesn't need equipment (except a chin-up bar) and it really emphasises working steadily in small steps. I can attest that you really do make steady progress with it, at least up to a point. It's too soon to tell whether it'll really turn me into an iron man within a couple of years. My progress so far has been well worth the price of the book.
I was a teenager before it was cool.
Cultellus

Re: Personal Debt/Goals/Accomplishments

Post by Cultellus »

Gorilla
Last edited by Cultellus on Mon Oct 04, 2021 3:09 am, edited 1 time in total.
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ceeboo
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Re: Personal Debt/Goals/Accomplishments

Post by ceeboo »

Hey Physics guy
Physics Guy wrote:
Mon Sep 20, 2021 12:20 pm
I've lost nearly 30 pounds now over about 20 months of intermittent fasting.
Awesome! Good for you.
Most of that loss was in the first 15 months, and it was enough to get me into the "healthy" BMI range. It hasn't seemed to work as well to get the last ten pounds off and become teen-age lean; I suspect that for that I'm going to have to control the rest of my diet a bit more carefully and build up more muscle. But the method continues to work well for keeping the weight off, by trimming back down gains I make over holidays. It's a reliable enough tool that I'm confident I'll be able to keep that weight off for good.

I've been using the variant where you eat normally 5 days a week, but reduce to 600 calories a day for two days a week. It's basically dieting in short sprints rather than a long marathon, because I'm really hungry on the fasting days, but it's only a day and it feels as though I'm really doing something, so I can maintain motivation. I'd rather be starving two days a week than be hungry for months on end.

You have to keep the other five days of the week normal, and that means normal healthy days with balanced nutrition and no more than 2000-ish calories. You don't have to do a lot of calorie-counting or find a lot of diet recipes, though. I split up the 600 calories into three 200-calorie micro meals, and counting up to 200 calories is all too damn easy. I've found a handful of 200-calorie combos that I just repeat on the fasting days. On those days I'm so happy to have anything that I don't miss variety. There seems to be some good kind of spillover effect from the fasting days onto the normal days, in fact, in that I'm just more aware of what a healthy amount of food to eat is, I'm more content with a healthy amount of food and more motivated not to overdo it.

There's no woo in this kind of intermittent fasting. It simply cuts a lot of calories from the week—enough to lose roughly a pound a week on average in theory. In practice I've let it slide a few times for holidays, and there have been some plateaus, so my long-term average has been maybe only about half a pound per week, but there have also been some good months where every week dropped a pound pretty consistently.

At first I thought that calorie reduction was absolutely all that mattered, because calories in food are just way more than you can burn with exercise. Eventually I realised, though, that precisely because those 2000 calories a day of basic metabolism are such a big energy budget compared to exercise, anything you do to tweak your metabolism can make a big difference. I noticed that fasting with light regular exercise was considerably more effective than only fasting, even though the calorie cost of the exercise was negligible. My hypothesis is that if I don't exercise at all, my body responds to calorie reduction by going into an energy-conserving slug mode, rather than by consuming stored fat. Keeping up some activity seems to keep me out of slug mode and keep the weight loss on track. I don't really know if that even makes sense, but I can offer the anecdotal evidence that for me it seemed to help.

I also found it helpful to weigh myself every day, at about the same time of day, and keep track of my daily weight in a spreadsheet. My weight bounces up and down quite a bit from day to day, I find, so if I only weighed once a week I might overreact to the random luck of that day. I keep track each day, but pay no real attention to the daily values and only worry about the weekly average, which tends to average away the daily noise and show the steady trend.

I've also been following this strength training regimen Convict Conditioning. You can buy the book online. The schtick is that the author developed this regimen while in prison, where the weight room is controlled by gangs so you have to exercise without equipment in your cell. I'm not sure I believe the guy's story, but the program seems good because I can do it at home in a few minutes a day.

CC lays out just a few kinds of exercise, and for each kind of exercise it has a sequence of ten levels, starting from a baby version that anyone can do. It tells you when you're ready to move up to the next level in each exercise kind. Level 5 is basically the standard version of a chin-up or push-up or whatever, and level 10 is an iron-man version (like freaking one-arm chin-ups). At this point level 6 is in sight for me for four of the six kinds of exercise; the other two kinds are advanced ones that you're not even supposed to start until you're at 6 or 7 on the basic four.

I'd recommend the program because it doesn't need equipment (except a chin-up bar) and it really emphasises working steadily in small steps. I can attest that you really do make steady progress with it, at least up to a point. It's too soon to tell whether it'll really turn me into an iron man within a couple of years. My progress so far has been well worth the price of the book.
Good information - Thanks for sharing it.

I would love to loose about 30 pounds as well (I'm 53 years old, 6 foot 1 and weighed 228 at my last doctors appointment) - I'm hoping I can get this done with relatively small changes (changing some diet things and doing some light cardio - maybe starting with walking - So we shall see what happens. One of my worries, because I have heard people say this but I'm not sure how true it is, is that the older we get, the harder it is to loose weight, specifically fat. Most of the fat I would love to loose is in by belly.

Anyway, thanks for the post!
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ceeboo
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Re: Personal Debt/Goals/Accomplishments

Post by ceeboo »

Hey Cultellus
Cultellus wrote:
Mon Sep 20, 2021 12:39 pm
Well crap.
Maybe that's the answer? If I crap more maybe I can loose the 30 pounds I am looking to loose. :)
Now I feel ridiculous. I made three major goals in 2020, all business related. I hit all three. And all the personal things you talked about here, I let slide. I gained a lot of weight during this pandemic. The hospital work and ICU stuff was particularly exhausting around March and April last year, but my personal reaction to it all could have been a lot better. I spend too much time on the computer, obviously. Gotta run more, literally.
Ridiculous? If you made all three of your business goals in 2020, that's fantastic! Congrats! And now that you have those goals behind you, you should have plenty of time, energy and focus to concentrate on you now. Run baby! Run!
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Personal Debt/Goals/Accomplishments

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

@ceeboo and physicsguy - that’s awesome. I love seeing people take control over some aspect of their lives that was niggling them and turn it around. Ref financial stuff, I don’t recall the last time I carried a balance on my card. That’s not a humble brag, it’s because of their cashback rewards. It started with one of them offering 2% cashback on all purchases. I couldn’t believe it. They were giving me free money every month, so why ruin it with interest on a running balance? And now, for the last seven years or so I’ve been using a card that offers airline miles. I literally haven’t paid for an airline ticket this whole time.

Anyway. If there’s a devil, I firmly believe he works in the finance sector. Reading ceeboo’s account above I was like, ““F”. Yes.” Love it.

- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
SirPoopsaLot
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Re: Personal Debt/Goals/Accomplishments

Post by SirPoopsaLot »

ceeboo wrote:
Mon Sep 20, 2021 12:55 pm
Hey Cultellus
Cultellus wrote:
Mon Sep 20, 2021 12:39 pm
Well crap.
Maybe that's the answer? If I crap more maybe I can loose the 30 pounds I am looking to loose. :)
Now I feel ridiculous. I made three major goals in 2020, all business related. I hit all three. And all the personal things you talked about here, I let slide. I gained a lot of weight during this pandemic. The hospital work and ICU stuff was particularly exhausting around March and April last year, but my personal reaction to it all could have been a lot better. I spend too much time on the computer, obviously. Gotta run more, literally.
Ridiculous? If you made all three of your business goals in 2020, that's fantastic! Congrats! And now that you have those goals behind you, you should have plenty of time, energy and focus to concentrate on you now. Run baby! Run!
Pooping more is always the answer to improving your health.
Cultellus

Re: Personal Debt/Goals/Accomplishments

Post by Cultellus »

Gorilla
Last edited by Cultellus on Mon Oct 04, 2021 3:09 am, edited 1 time in total.
Cultellus

Re: Personal Debt/Goals/Accomplishments

Post by Cultellus »

Gorilla
Last edited by Cultellus on Mon Oct 04, 2021 3:09 am, edited 1 time in total.
Cultellus

Re: Personal Debt/Goals/Accomplishments

Post by Cultellus »

Gorilla
Last edited by Cultellus on Mon Oct 04, 2021 3:09 am, edited 1 time in total.
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