Debt Free by 43: Surviving Layoff During The First Year of Profit First for Family

Disclaimer: Yes, I have an Amazon Affiliate link so I get a small kickback from your purchases. This helps me feed my minions and not live in a van down by the river.

It's early morning in February. It's the 25th which means it is Profit First "Pay Day" which is also "Bill Pay Day". Years ago I set a goal for our family to become debt-free. I decided to name my financial goal "Debt Free By 43". I cannot tell you the exact date that it became this but it's not important.

When I started this path, I didn't have a plan in place. Over the course of the years, I was implementing random things to pay down different bills. Nothing was concrete.

Over the years, I've listened to Dave Ramsey's book "The Total Money Makeover" and his method. He has great ideas but we couldn't commit to the process 100%. Using our credit card as a safety net plus combining the amount we earned with cashback bonus points was too hard to say no to at that time. We were still spending enormous amounts of money on fast food, random purchases, and things for our kids, things we didn't need. We were paying off our credit card every month, I don't know how but we were. Things needed to change.

Somewhere, I saw someone mention the book Profit First by Mike Michalowicz. The idea of this book piqued my interest. I ordered it instantly. Devoured the book. Implemented it for my business in December 2018. I'll add more information about how I set these things up for my business later.

I was still in the first year of implementation for my business when I notice how big of a difference it was making. This got me thinking about how at the end of the book, it talks about how to apply the practice for families. In April 2019, I set up the accounts for our family.

My bank kind of thinks I am crazy... but they work with us and have been extremely helpful. Over the course of 2019, we paid off an insane amount of debt using a tweaked version of this system. I will talk more about that as I sit down to write about it... because the debt we were digging out of was 80% business debt and it's embarrassing. 

So as I sat down with my BIG ASS coffee, I logged into my online banking and opened my Profit First spreadsheet calculator. In the future, I will provide a link to my calculator. This calculator makes this whole process much easier. It is a matter of entering one number into a field and the spreadsheet does the math for me. Boom. Done. Easy.

Here is what I was feeling, thinking, and realizing as I entered those numbers.

I was scared that I wasn't going to have enough to cover all of the business and family bills...

I won't hide the fact that this season has been harder than we anticipated.

Real Facts Behind the Scenes of Debt Free By 43

Yes, this is kind of a weird topic to air publicly, but it's something that is real. Stay tuned as I am working on writing an entire series about our journey to becoming Debt Free By 43. I'm using a tweaked combined version of the Profit First (for Family) and Total Money Makeover. My goal, my plan called Debt Free by 43. I will be open about our embarrassing numbers... but it is scary.

Also, as a side note: It hasn't been easy, but we have sprinkled fun into the middle with other random weird wins. When you work hard towards a goal you have to celebrate the small wins along the way!

Here’s the time for shameless self-promotion. It's how I help pay our bills, with my business... but it's also why it all started. I chose to take control and figure out a way to improve my life. SCROLL A LITTLE FURTHER to order yourself a Freakn Tee, join the Freakn Proud Club!

This is how we Kick Today in the Dick! May the force be with you! 

By changing our life One Day at a time with One Thing at a time.

The Perfectly Flawed Badass Fashion Freak