Welcome together, we're gonna explore our personal finances and figure out how to improve them. Whether you're just getting started in life on your finances, or you may already have a home and a car payment and you're struggling to get credit cards under control. Are you getting a later start in life on saving for retirement, reduce debt increase wealth.com is a podcast to educate those to improve personal finances, whether it's eliminating debt, or making smart investments. Hello, Mr. Chuck here. This episode I'm going to review what we've gone over the past I'm going to try to get back to why I started this podcast to help those whose travel struggling to pay down debt and to get out of debt like I was a few years ago. I have covered A lot of personal finance information that could be helpful to everybody that you should know about, such as insurance buying a house investment for dummies, credit cards, the best budgeting apps debt consolidation, what is a financial advisor, reverse mortgages, budgeting, how much you should plan on paying for home, or housing, transportation, clothing and food along with ways to get you out of debt. When I first got this podcast started, that's what I concentrated on. And that's why I'm going back to and just to remind you, for some of us who hadn't listened to my first episode, I'm currently a truck driver, a retired certified public accountant. I am not working in the financial industry at all at this time. I'm not an attorney. I'm not a debt counselor. I have nothing to do with that. And this podcast is intended for those who have more than one multiple credit card debts, maybe a couple car loans, and who are struggling from paycheck to paycheck. And I my goal is to help those people get their debt under control and be able to live a much better life with reduced debt. There is some debt you have to have such as home, mortgage and maybe one car loan or two. The less debt you have, the better off you're gonna be. Remember, the only thing you cannot finance is your retirement. Everybody needs to start saving for the retirement as soon as possible. I know at times that can be difficult. It was for me In it well, it still is getting yourself out of debt. And one of the ways you can do if you don't have an app application on your smartphone or your computer at home, to help you manage your finances and manage your finances, start with having the three accounts that you need a checking account, where you pay all your bills, a savings account, where you build up your emergency fund and a retirement account. Those are three accounts, you absolutely need to have to have a better life overall, how you get there is beside the point. But you need to start with those three things. One of the things you can use to help you manage everything better our spreadsheets, if you're not in trouble accountant or don't have any accounting background as spreadsheet when I learned how to use a spreadsheet with back before computers, that's how old I am. I manually learn how to do it piece of paper with columns on it, he put a heading across the top he put down, rolls rows down the side and you manually fill you know, put in your, what it was, descriptions, etc and your dollar amounts and whatever information you want it to put in there. Then you manually had to go down and add up all of them columns, and then cross foot and it was a pain in the butt, but it gave you good information. Now a spreadsheets exactly the same thing, but the computer can do all the math for you. If you're good at math, picking up on learning how to use a spreadsheet is going to be easy. If you're bad at math and bad at numbers is going to be more of a challenge. I have an Excel spreadsheet. On my Windows computer, there's a Google spreadsheet. Google works good in some formats, and that's good and the other I, I'm not into bars and graphs and all that kind of stuff, but I keep it basic and easy to use. The formulas are all in there, you just need to understand what they're gonna do and information is going to give us to those math wizards will have a heads up on that. And I did do some research and I came up with a spreadsheet that helps you reduce your debt, you put in all your debt and I'll help you it's pre program. You put in your loan information, whether it's a credit card, multiple credit cards, car payments, mortgage, everything, and you can select the method how you want to apply Apply your payments. This is something you can use in addition to your budgeting app. If you have a budgeting app, if you took the time to set up a budgeting app with your checking account, you're gonna have a lot of the information already available. So you can just transfer it to this spreadsheet. And then the spreadsheet will help you determine which ones to pay off and how much interest you're gonna save how much you know how much interest you're gonna pay out. If you use method as a snowball method, what's your total interest you're going to pay and when it's going to be paid off, how many months if you use the avalanche, how much interest you're gonna pay. So it gives you a lot of scenarios and it's really helpful. And the best part is this particular one, which is probably the better ones of the two is free as long as you have less than 10 credit accounts to put in there. So let's say you have five credit cards, two car payments, so you know got more than 10 loans. For whatever reason, we can still use the free one, what you do is you just one, you want to work on paying off your highest items, first highest interest rate items, which would be credit cards. So if you got nine credit cards, just put in all your credit cards, and then have it tell you the order you should be paying it off and tell you how much you're getting. So you work on getting your credit when you get all your credit cards paid off. Then you can put in your other loans and work on those, you know, the second highest rate interest rate loans you got and you can do it in a series like that. That way you don't have to pay out any money. But even if you want to buy it, put all that in there at once. I think it's $10. So it's really not a whole lot of money. And it also has a credit repair spreadsheet, which is the same as the debt reduction calculator is what they're calling it. But they also have a credit repair spreadsheet that helps you fix your credit score. And it's exactly the same as the debt reduction calculator, but it's got some additional feature, which gonna help you make payments to those items that maybe you have too much of a balance you're carrying on them and they'll help you get it down to improve your credit score. And it's got all kinds of stuff in there and it's free to same thing. And you can do it Excel 2007 or later. And they have older versions Excel 2003, which is pretty old. So if you're one of those that buy software and never updates it then you're probably pretty good shape there. And if you go to my website reduced that increased wealth calm, go to my show notes. I have a link to this article that tells you about it. And then the article has links to the site where you can get these spreadsheets. The spreadsheet is vertex 40 two.com. calculators, credit repair dot html. So it's for text 40 two.com go to then at the top has got Excel templates, counters, calculators, go to calculators, and then it has a whole list, I got a bunch of stuff, it's gonna be a good place to go. If you're interested in finding spreadsheets to help you in your journey of becoming debt free and finding your financial freedom. I'm going to go to the article now and we're going to go over theirs. They have four of them in that article and it's from the The balanced calm free debt reduction spreadsheets. The best free reduction spreadsheets is where I found all this information. coming up with a plan for paying off debt may sound difficult, especially if you don't have a financial background which I assume most of you don't. So this these spreadsheets this helps make your life better first text 42 debt reduction snowball calculator and credit repair spreadsheet and they go through it's not very long, and they tell you what it does and that's rank number one and notebook. Number two is squawk Fox debt reduction spreadsheet. The person who had a blog claims to paid off $17,000 in student loans over six months he can read what that does. Number three, it's your money Excel debt tracker spreadsheet It's not quite as elegant as others, but it has features in there you might find useful and for how much debt costs spreadsheet from live debt free. And it doesn't do a lot of things, but it gives you some useful information. Those are the four that's in this article. And the article talks about them a little bit more than I do. And there's links to their websites where you can download these spreadsheets. I'm now going to go in a little more detail on the spreadsheets, especially the for Tex 40 two.com spreadsheets, and even more specific than that the credit repair spreadsheet because I think that's the one you should be getting. It's a two step process, the new credit repair edition of our popular debt reduction calculator. It's designed to help improve your credit score by using the snowball effect. Reduce your credit card balance to specific levels. Why does this help? One of the things that hurt your credit score is have a high balance compared to your credit limit. Instead of waiting until a car is completely paid off to apply this snowball to the next debt. Our spreadsheet helps you reduce your debt and two stages. This is advertising one goal one credit repair. The debt reduction calculator first uses your extra monthly payment IE snowball to pay down their credit cards to the balanced you specify go to debt free. After the first goal is met. The snowball is used to pay off your credit cards using the normal snowball approach. For those of you who don't know what the snowball method is, you need to go back and listen to an episode where I talked about that but basically It pays off your lowest balance first. So you can see a, you know, some achievement that you're making progress where the avalanche method pays off your highest interest rate first, I kind of use a mixture of both. If you have a credit card with a very low balance guess get it down to zero. So you may be could use that credit card to your advantage and future months. And this spreadsheet helps you achieve a better credit rating. Because it's gonna help you pay off your high balances, too You can get a better credit rating. What your balance should be compared to your limit is probably each credit bureau has their own little formula I've read whereas if your bounce is less than 10% So if you have a credit card with a credit balance, they can charge it up to $10,000 10% of that would be 1000. So if we keep your balance under 1000, you're going to get a better credit rating. And that's not realistic either. If you can at least keep it under 50% as ain't gonna hurt your credit rating, it may help you a little bit. But you see where we're going with this does the lower balance your Karen compared to your limit, the higher the credit rating you're going to have, you're going to have the credit available as proves that you can control your spending and it gives you a better rating. I guess that's where that goes. And at the bottom of this site, if you come to the site and do the download at the bottom has you notes and stuff resources, credit repair and how to help yourself consumer.ftc.gov building a better credit report. And again, it's the same website. And you can go there and learn how you can improve your credit score. And then you can use this spreadsheet calculator to achieve that goal. They also have about a three minute YouTube video on their site that shows you how to use their spreadsheet, this particular debt reduction calculator. So it's a very good spreadsheet. It does a lot. It's all set up for you. You just go in and put in your loan information. And you can take it from there. learn as you go, as I say, fairly easy to use. If you if you got any experience with spreadsheets, there'll be so Snap, if you don't have any experience, it may take you, you know, have hour or so to figure out what it's going to do and how it's going to do it, but watch their YouTube video they have in there and that definitely gonna give you a lot of information on what this spreadsheet template can do for you. So I would like to use this template and access of using a budgeting app. So when you do a financial plan let you need to set your goals. Set up a budget, keep track of your budget. And then within your financial personal financial plan, you need a debt reduction plan. And that's where this spreadsheet template can help you with your debt reduction plan. And you can put on all your dead inherit leads up to 10 of them for free. And then You can manage it and control it and see how you're doing and it's pretty, pretty nice spreadsheet so I wouldn't be talking about it. If I didn't like it it works fairly good from what I cuz I don't this so you know, I never downloaded it I'm not using it I don't have any debt I got one mortgage payment that almost pay it off. So, I've, I've done my method pretty much on the manual side and we'll go from there. Remember, you need to make the minimum payment on all of your credit cards so that you can build up your emergency fund that's number one. And then once you have enough money in your emergency fund to cover something that might pop up as a car repair. Nothing major but you know stuff that you can avoid using a credit card for Because you got to quit creating new debt in order to get your debt paid off. So I have your emergency fund set up. Once you get emergency fund, you build up extra in there. And then you can make maybe once a quarter once every six months, an extra payment, because this calculators template, you put in there how much your minimum payments gonna be, and that's what you can afford, then you will put the excess money that you have into if there's such a thing and to your savings account. And the first step is build an emergency fund. Second step is to over build your emergency fund and then make a big lump sum payment to your credit, so you pay it down real quick. Remember, as long as that money's in your savings account, it is your emergency fund until you draw out part of it to pay off your debt, then your emergency fund drops down a little bit, but then you build it back up. So you will have a decent amount of emergency fund if you do everything right. And that's where this debt count reduction cochlear help you because within this calculator, if you watch the YouTube video, you can put in that the month that you make that extra payment, and then it's going to re adjust everything to show you the how many more months are your remaining two for your payoffs months, months to pay off. And so it works really nice and it's got a custom feature in there where you can pick the order that you want to pay, pay these loans off like you can pick the first one to be paid off as a very small balance. And then after that, maybe the second smallest balance and then after that you can start applying To the highest interest first, which is a combination of the snowball avalanche method, and it will tell you your monthly payment, you know what interest you're going to pay so you can snowball method, this much interest, avalanche avalanche method, this month interest, my method this month now you can look at it and say, well the avalanche has kind of saved me 1200 dollars over the life of this paying all this off. The snowball method is gonna save me $800 the way I've chose to do it is gonna say make $950 you know what's going on? It's good planning. So I highly recommend this. I don't use it. I'm not affiliate with it. If you have more than 10 creditors and you would like to have more than 10 creditors on their factory If you pay $9 and 95 cents for personal use, you can have up to 40 creditors on Excel or 20 on the Google Sheets can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's it, you know, it's kind of work, I'd say, do the 10 credit one because it's free. If you have 20 creditors, let's put your first 10 in, put all your credit cards, see how it works. And then maybe you can pay your $9 and 95 cents later and put in all your credit your debt in there and see what your answers could be. At a small price to pay could save you thousands of dollars in interest. And that's what we're striving for. Because the less interest you pay, the more principal you're gonna be paying down. The more principal you paid down, the less that you're gonna have, the less that you're gonna have, the better off you're gonna be. Again, it's all online. things related to the other dislike and personal financing. You may not need to know about insurance. But insurance is a necessity because some of its required for your home. If you got a mortgage, your car, if you got a loan, and if you have dependent, a wife or children, depending on your income, a term life insurance is a good option. That half thing I've talked about. It's all related. One thing helps with the other. It may not seem like it at the time, when you're trying to just focus on getting out of debt. Having your goal set up. One, get out debt, pay off my credit cards, say for retirement. That's a goal. How do you reach your goals? You got to know how much money's coming in how much money is going out. That's called a budget. How you doing on your budget. All right. overspending, underspending, maybe you have a category set too high where you don't spend that much on that particular category. So you didn't maybe reduce that down a little bit. Or another category that you're a little short on, you can increase that up a little bit. It's a fine tuning that should happen, month to month, year to year on, it's an ongoing progress up progress. That's always changing because nothing ever stays the same throughout your life. Maybe you pay off a car, maybe your spouse wrecks a car, and you have to get a new car. So the old car payments paid off. Now you got a new car payment, term start all over. It's never ending. So you got to be fluid with your budgeting process. You got to be fluid with your debt reduction plan. You can't just say I'm going to do this. And if it doesn't work, I give up because probably will work for a while, but then it won't work long term, maybe it's not an overnight fix. Hopefully you didn't get that far. And that overnight, it happened over time. getting out of debt will happen over time. That's keep working, maybe find a second job, maybe find another way to increase your income. And you can then speed up some of your debt reduction plan. For those of you that keep listening to my podcast week to week, I hope you're getting some enjoyment, maybe not enjoyment, some benefit from it. Maybe you're learning, I would wish that you would tell your friends. I hope that I'm getting better at this. I know I've changed how I do my episodes. I used just to read an article and then comment on it. Then I was reading an article on common and as I was reading, now I don't even read out I read dark well before I start my episode and then I Just talk about I hope that makes my episodes more better and easier to understand some as an average person who has been successful and getting their debt paid down and getting their house paid off, almost. Until next time, stick with your budget. Check out the spreadsheet templates. Get your debt reduction plan under control. Get your emergency fund set up. Good luck. Stay with it. You'll do it. That's the end of another episode. I hope you found it useful. And a few you'd like to share this episode with your friends please do so. I'm open for any suggestions for improvement or for information that you would like to talk about in future episodes. You can go to my Facebook page and leave me a message more than glad to comply. To find my Facebook page go to reduce debt, increase wealth calm and click on the Facebook icon to go to my Facebook website.