When Dave Ramsey talks about paying off debt, he talks about Murphy, of Murphy’s law. That law states that what can go wrong, will go wrong. IN the UK, we’re more likely to call it Sod’s Law, whoever Mr or Mrs Sod was, who coined the law, I’ve no idea!
Chances are that paying down debt is going to take a while, multiple years possibly, but the snowball or avalanche method (which we talked about in the last blog) will give you the best chance of clearing it as quickly as possible.
You’ll also find that the process becomes somewhat addictive. You’ll find yourself looking for more money down the back of the sofa to stack against the debt. You’ll be asking for extra shifts and all sorts – just to accelerate the process.
But along the way, you WILL have setbacks. Sod’s Law says something will happen and it will set you back. Now hopefully, the starter emergency fund will shield you from most of those, if they come in the form of unexpected bills.
Let’s say that happens. You’re happily rolling the debt snowball and the head gasket blows on the car. That’s a few hundred quid of work that needs doing. Frustrating, but you have the money set aside to do it. But what happens now?
At this point, your new first priority is to top that emergency fun back up. So, you might need to pause the debt snowball for two or three months by making minimum payments on your debts to other, in order to pay back the debt to your emergency fund.
They say that bad things come in threes. While that’s almost certainly nonsense, you don’t want to be caught short with your emergency fund short of cash, if another expected bill comes along.
Some of your setbacks will be self-inflicted. Don’t beat yourself up, but don’t be too soft on yourself either. Self-talk such as ‘you’ve worked really hard – you deserve a bit of a blowout. Go shopping!’ That sort of self-talk is really not going to help you in the long run.
Remember the motivations you had at the start of the process? Check back to the sheet where you wrote them down. Refocus, get your head down, and don’t use debt to make yourself feel good – find other ways instead.
But if Sod’s Law happens, you’ve got your starter emergency fund. Concentrate then on topping that back up to where it should be, and then begin rolling the snowball again.
Leave a Reply