When I landed my first job as a warehouse picker and packer at a local school supply business, I brought home pretty good chunks of change. My first paycheck was $472 after taxes, for two weeks of full time summer work at a wage of $7 per hour. I worked that job for a solid year or so, then got a job at a trucking company, then another one at a UPS shipping hub as a loader. I got great exercise and good paychecks - all without having to pay rent, food, utilities, and all the rest of the money-sucking, wealth-killing bills. After two months at the UPS job, I blew all $2700 or so of my total after-tax earnings on a brand new custom built PC that I designated a name that would eventually become the name of my computer consulting company. I totally accept that I spent all this money on my first custom built computer, because it really did become the foundation of my IT consulting business. I look at that as if I turned a $2700 investment into a lifetime of hundreds of thousands of dollars (eventually millions) in wages!

During this time, I drove a couple free cars that my grandfather and my father handed down to me - a Nissan Sentra, then a Toyota Corolla. What if I biked to work instead? Sure they were 10 miles away or less, but it was totally doable. That way I could have saved money on gas and even maintenance. I remember at one point, I had to open up a Goodyear credit card because I didn't even have the cash to buy all new tires, brakes, and do a wheel alignment. I recall it was around $500 for this maintenance and it was a huge budget-buster for a college student like myself back in the day. What if I never spent money eating out, or doing entertainment, or spending money on dining out for dates? It's easy to see the massive, cumulative, and compounding savings and interest there in terms of dollar amounts.

However, I also realize what a complete and utter loser I would be in terms of having any semblance of a social life. While I do hugely regret the decade of frivilous spending that I used to do, I do not regret living a life and spending money to be social, going out and having fun, and enjoying some of the cool gadgets and things while growing up and going through college.

It really hit me like a ton of bricks tonight when I saw in my QuickBooks that I have literally drawn out over a quarter of a million dollars in the Owner's Draw equity account over the past five years. This is basically all cash I have literally spent on frivolous things, rent, eating out, taxes, interest, paying off debts and who knows what else. If I was still living at home, and saving huge amounts of money while still working my butt off and earning a high income, I would be a millionaire by now. It would be awesome if I could spawn an alter-ego of myself, send him back in time to life the "perfect financial life" so all these things can be realized and I could have a million cold hard cash dollars in my bank account. But I digress, because I certainly do not regret one bit of living on my own, with my wonderful wife, and my very comfortable apartment with my comfortable furniture, nice TVs, computers and server loaded with *cough*free*cough* uhm moving pictures for gobs of free entertainment. And the best part about it all? I get to spend the next decade improving my net worth and staying the hell away from debt as best as I possibly can!

So, there are certainly some things in life I have learned the hard way and while there are definitely LOTS of regrets I have in what I have spent money on in the past, I can't help but appreciate the fact that I will be moving forward in the future being super smart about money, spending, and living a lot more frugally. At the same time though, I have a renewed appreciation for certain things that are okay to spend money on. After all, life IS too short and you COULD get hit by a bus the next day. Better enjoy the ride while it lasts!

Paying taxes is so hard to swallow. It's money that you've worked very hard to earn and it gets swallowed up by the inefficient, bloated, debt-ridden United States government. And $5,000 is like 0.00000001% of their multi-Trillion Dollar Budget. What a ridiculous joke right? I feel like only people who earn more than $1m should pay taxes and it should be at least 45% tax rate without ridiculous exemptions and write-offs that force the government to look at people with lower income levels for more taxes. Everyone else should be tax-exempt, period. That would make the economy so healthy wouldn't it? Also! I believe corporations should foot the highest tax rates. I think it's totally unfair that a multi-billion dollar corporation like Google, Apple, Exxon-Mobil, and others get to use tax loopholes and have off-shore accounts to avoid paying US corporation taxes. Even then, they only have to pay less than 25% tax rate, with some paying NO taxes whatsoever? GM anyone? That makes NO damn sense to me! Of course it makes sense though. They have money. So they can lobby Congress to enact tax laws and do little "favors" for them and leave the real meat of America in the dust. They export jobs overseas. They hire cheap labor or replace with robots. They avoid paying taxes. They do this so they can give nice big fat bonuses to fat board members, executives, and CEOs.

Employees have it even more difficult. They have to pay the federal government up-front every paycheck they receive. They have to pay FICA, Medicare taxes, Social Security taxes. What a joke! What if you don't want or need government-assisted services? Why pay for something that will most likely crash and burn in a few years? (Social Security). The nice thing about being self-employed is I pay taxes quarterly, and even then, I can under-pay it a little bit. During the time between, I can re-invest the cash in business operations, investments, stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. I effectively turn the tables against Uncle Sam, where I get to make interest on money that goes to taxes FIRST, before he does (if I were an employee).

Later this year, I have to pay 2 more estimate tax payments of $1675 each, and one in January of next year. So I owe just over another $5k in taxes before tax year's end. If business continues swimmingly, I will be pulling in $100k or more in gross revenue. So 5% of that cash is going to taxes, with 12% going to rent. Those remain my two biggest expenses and my hope is to have at least $50k cash in the bank - AFTER TAX. I dream of the day where we can own our own home free and clear and only have to pay property taxes instead of mortgage and rent. That's the American Dream I suppose. Until next time folks.

The precursor to this mess of thoughts I'm having was the sock on my foot that has a hole in it due to the dog chewing the crap out of it. We need new socks. Bad. Our dog, JJ, just loves to chew on all of our socks so we went from having at least 24 pairs of socks, down to just a handful, and the last remaining handful have holes all over them. How embarassing. Yet, earlier today, I spent a good 30 minutes browsing Amazon for black low rise socks. Thirty minutes. And I still haven't bought socks.

For a long time now, I've also been wanting to update my wardrobe significantly. There are a lot of T-shirts that are faded, have shrunken to near oblivion, and in general I have "immature" clothes for a 30 year old. I still dress like I'm in high school and I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing. I just know that I really need a clothes overhaul, but I have been putting it off so long because I have this little goal in the back of my head where I think once I lose 20-30 pounds of weight, then I will do a clothes makeover. Of course, I have been slacking on that horribly, and I still weigh 215 pounds when I should weigh no more than 190. Additionally, I just simply do not feel like shelling out a few hundred on clothes.

This weekend was a hell of a battle for me in another area too. I finished watching Breaking Bad seasons 1 through 3 (yes, a total marathon and I completed it in just 4 days). So, after watching the most awesome show on Earth, I got bored. Really bored. So I started randomly thinking about going to a casino and playing some Blackjack, but with an agenda. I wanted to walk into a casino with $1,000 cash. And play $100/bet Blackjack. My goal was to try to double this cash, but then I started thinking about going for $5k, then possibly $10k. My rationale spiraled out of control there and it just became totally crazy. I had never in my life bet that much money, ever. And I have managed to lose $3k over a weekend in Vegas in the past, just playing $5 Blackjack, or $20 three card poker. It was that particular weekend when I became immensely turned off of gambling in general. I realized that for the decade that we always went to Vegas for the annual bowling sweeps, I had lost money. Every. Time. I am the world's unluckiest (or dumbest) gambler. I mean, I have definitely won money. But then I don't stop. So I lose it and then some. It's always a lose-lose game for me, this gambling thing. I swore on my life that I would never gamble again. And I haven't. It's been over 2 years now that I've stepped foot into a casino. This weekend though. Man, I really wanted to go. Bad. But I didn't. I guess that's a good thing.

This frugal thing is really hard sometimes. The reason I am way more frugal now is because when I was in debt and always spending so much money, I was miserable. But right now, as I type this, I have just over $10k cash in my bank accounts, no debts, and a much, much better financial picture, but I'm still miserable. I'm bored and I don't want to spend money to have fun. Thank God I play softball twice a week (and it's a really cheap sport compared to say, bowling, or golfing). I'd go NUTS if I didn't have softball. Maybe I should play softball every night of the week. I'd take care of everything in a one-two punch that I really want to do. Which is have fun on the cheap, and lose weight and be more active & healthier.

Ok, now that I'm done being a total complainypants, I'm going to take action. In just a few hours, I will drag my ass over to Sam's Club, use this gift card I got in exchange for returning my iPad that I never used, and buy new socks!

Anyway, at the end of our session, her recommendation, for best results, is to keep going on a weekly basis so we can always jump right in and tackle the root issues, instead of playing catch-up all the time. Valid point, but obviously a point that will handsomely pad her bank account an extra $200 a month - or a whopping $700 per month if I were to go there four times a month and pay her full rate.

With all these professionals charging so much money, I must be missing something here. I, myself, charge a measly $75 per hour for on-site computer consulting work. I just paid a bill from my CPA who charged me $800 for my business tax returns, $350 for our personal 1040 and CA 540 tax returns, and another $200 for a misc. tax issue I had her help me with. All told, I paid her a whopping $1350. I also just paid a bill from a marketing professional to help me with boosting my business "image" and "brand" a little bit more and give his professional and expert take on my existing website. He produced a few emails, and some PDF reports for his work. The damage? 3 hours of his billable time at a rate of $190, for a total of $570. On top of that, I had hired a web developer on oDesk for $8.89 per hour. This is a guy that lives and works in the Middle East somewhere. But basically he put in dozens and dozens of hours of real, hard coding work on my website and produced an amazing result. I was able to fuse my marketing guy's ideas, my own, and his, and get my website upgraded in a HUGE way, for a measly $112 all told.

So when we talk about Gross Revenue, we can paint a pretty darn clear picture of these different professionals' walks of life:

• Web Developer from Middle East Somewhere: $8.89 per hour, 40 hours a week = $1422/mo = ~$17k/yr
• Psychotherapist in Studio City, CA: $175 per hour, 40 hours a week = $28,000/mo = ~$336k/yr
• Marketing Professional in Huntington Beach, CA: $190 per hour, 40 hours a week = $30,400/mo = ~365k/yr
• CPA in Upland, CA: this one is a little bit harder because she does it by returns. I recall asking her how many returns she does per year, and she did say "hundreds and thousands" if I recall correctly. So let's just call it 1,000 returns per year, at an average of about $700 per return. That equals about $700,000 gross revenue, but she does have an office staff, and probably considerably more overhead than all the other professionals. Still, she's raking in the cash!
• Me, computer consultant in the Inland Empire: $75 per hour, 40 hours a week = $12,000/mo = $144k/yr

Obviously there are taxes, overhead, and the fact that with professionals, work is not as steady as the 9-5 job where hours are set in stone and you are paid an exact sum every month. Some months are bad, some are good. In my case, I consider myself to be pretty darn lucky, because I am pulling in about $160k per year gross revenue, with about $100k net after direct overhead expenses. Beyond that, I probably end up with $45k in net profit after ALL expenses - business and personal - as well as taxes and all the other crap. So I'm actually making more than what a salaried professional would make if s/he were paid $75 per hour, for 40 hours a week. And for me, there are plenty of days where it's a complete lull with no billable hours. How I have never managed any kind of savings is literally still a mystery. It proves just how bad I blew away all my real cash.

But anyway, the real point of me writing about this, is I'm trying to grapple with the true benefits of paying relatively so much money to my psychotherapist and to my marketing professional. I'm trying to see the "bigger picture" by thinking in terms of intangible benefits where I think to myself, If I am mentally healthy and have a great marriage with my wife, then I will be happier and I will therefore be more motivated and more productive in life and therefore grow wealthier in terms of not just money, but in happiness, love, and life itself. Then when I pay my marketing professional ridiculous sums to just basically give me his professional expertise and feedback on my website and overall brand and image, I have to think along the lines of If this website and my business image impresses the prospective client, I only need one of these clients to bill a few billable hours and it will pay for the marketing professionals time over and over again. I have landed this client for life. Couple BOTH of these intangible benefits together and I've really got something awesome on the horizon.

But when I see a bill for hundreds and hundreds of dollars or thousands as in the case of my CPA's bill, the frugality side of me kicks in and starts screaming like a child with Tourette's. It's very difficult to see beyond the dollar signs and the three, or four digits that follow. Very hard for me to stomach this.

And what's really sad, is I still haven't taken my wife on a real honeymoon! We have $3,500 in savings allocated as our honeymoon/house fund and I keep leaning towards the house part, but really, we need a vacation bad!!!!!!

Woe is me.

I have this particular spreadsheet that I have regularly contributed to for years now, and continue to do so. It has sheets dating back to September of 2008, showing my Assets, subtracted by Liabilities, and ultimately showing my Net Worth. It's a very black and white financial snapshot, and I kept meticulous track of all of my accounts with this spreadsheet. While I use QuickBooks for business, it doesn't give me the true black and white overview of my "financial snapshot" so to speak, because some accounts in QuickBooks are equity accounts that don't get included in the Profit and Loss reports and others are personal accounts that I don't track in QB.

Anyway, here is the first day of my financial snapshot, to illustrate:

It was that day when I started my spreadsheet. It was the day I first took out a $10,000 loan because I had large purchases in the pipeline for my business. I had to buy a whole bunch of computers and a server and with my weak capital and credit lines, I simply could not afford it. So, I borrowed $10,000 from my grandparents and set out to track everything with this spreadsheet. You can see that I had over $25k in debts and liabilities. I was always very good about keeping up with bills, which the A/P shows as zero. I also had a savings of $2,500 going. It's too bad I was a horrible spender and credit card user from the outset.

Fast forward to 2009, and the picture looks nearly identical with the debt and liabilities load:

The only difference here is I managed to pay off that loan, and reduce my Net Worth to $-851. However, the debt is still there because I had always actively used my credit cards. My wife owed me $8k here for a boob job that I paid for with my credit card so I could reap huge rewards points with it. She paid me back within the next couple days after this snapshot was taken.

Let's move forward to March of 2010:

What's really interesting here is my Net Worth is still negative, and my liabilities have skyrocketed to over $24k. I also have way more credit cards opened here, and my A/P is a massive $20k. This is because after I reconciled most of my credit cards, I shoved them into the A/P accounts in QB with the intent of paying them all off outright. Of course, that never happened because I continued to use credit and funnel whatever cash I got my hands on back into paying down credit cards. And, my pathetic attempts at growing any kind of savings account was futile, because those credit card bills just kept on coming!

As I have written previously, I finally declared war on debt in January of 2011. I vowed to stop using credit altogether, and focus on paying off ALL debts as fast as I possibly could. The day I declared war was January 1st, 2011, so this snapshot reflects my financial picture a day after that date of infamy:

What I failed to include in the liabilities section all along, were our car loans at the time. We had two car loans - one for my Matrix and one for the gas guzzling, money pit of a Tacoma truck. In mid-2011, I finally paid off my car loan, and in December 2011, we traded in the truck for a roadster that we paid for with cash.  So the adjusted financial snapshot for January of 2011 was more in the $35k liabilities range, and a far, far weaker Net Worth.

After all our hard, hard work in paying down and paying off debts, I can proudly present to you, my current financial snapshot which shows NO debt whatsoever (aside from the regular business A/P and Sales Tax Payable accounts which will always be current liabilities):

For the first time in my entire life, I have a current net worth of over $20k, let alone a positive net worth! Granted, there are more things like my businesses and our cars, as well as our material possessions that count as assets which are not included in any of my financial snapshots to date. However, I'm only looking at current, short-term liquid assets here. One big difference here is the lack of liabilities accounts I actively track. It sure has reduced a lot of stress in my life. Another difference here is I focus how much cash I actually have, which as of today, is almost $6k. My short term goal for cash is to have $10k in both of my checking accounts, with the rest spilling over to savings accounts. My biggest problem in the past was cash flow. I have learned time and time again that it is important to have a cash cushion for daily business operations. I was funding it with credit all the time in the past, and could never get ahead, because the credit lines were massive. All the real cash I was pulling in was immediately going out to finance my debts. I was always underwater with credit cards and it didn't matter how "careful" I was in tracking all of the accounts on a regular basis.

The key takeaway here, for myself, and for all of you out there, is you grow your cash so much faster when you have zero debts to worry about!

Back when I was using revolving debt to finance operating expenses and operations in business, I was one miserable dude. I hated seeing $10,000 cash in my checking for one day, only to know I had to pay off a massive credit card balance. It just seemed that I could not hold onto the dollars. Five years ago, I did have $5,000 cash stashed in a mutual fund over at Vanguard. However, it lasted a mere two months and I quickly depleted that fund when I bought my Toyota Matrix. Since then, I simply did not bother to replenish the account and closed it instead.

So, with the hard five years of constantly doing the debt cycle, and finally breaking free and seeing some REAL cash in the bank, I am so much happier. I think my wife can tell too, since she could always see how angry and miserable I was whenever I was short on cash. If there were only a couple hundred bucks in my operating account, I would be angry, miserable, and lash out at people.

The biggest thing that has helped me in saving money and building up a cash cushion is simply reducing bills. The biggest bill you can kill are credit card bills and to do so, you simply stop using credit cards, pay them off, and voila! You have less and less bills to worry about. At my peak debt, I had a balance on at least 10 different credit cards. It was a huge chore just keeping up with payment due dates, minimum payments, and actually trying to pay down all balances as much as possible, which in turn kills the cash flow. I am amazed how trapped I was with credit cards. It still blows my mind to this day. Now that I no longer have to worry about 10 credit card bills, I feel less stressed and freer. Additionally, I have killed the car payment, which was yet another bill. Having less bills in general seems to make the cash appear so quickly. I am at the point where, after all my regular monthly bills are paid, I have at least $5-10k net profit every month, so that means I should very easily be able to save $50k this year alone, and possibly more.

Here are my cash hoarding goals in a nutshell:

• 1-2 Months: Save $5k in checking account number 2 (DONE in one month!)
• 3-6 Months: Save $10k in both checking accounts for a total of $20k in operating cash after all expenses. This is to be a cash cushion
• 12 Months or less: Save $40-60k total cash across all accounts. Use this money for a downpayment on a home

Now about that home....a topic for another day!

So, kill the bills, save the cash, and become a way happier person who has way less stress in their life!

There was a period in my financial life where I was subscribed to everything under the sun. I had several magazine subscriptions, website memberships, ezine subscriptions, and was a member of several organizations that just like to take your money such as the local chambers of commerce for a few surrounding cities near me. While I understand there are intangible benefits to such memberships and subscriptions, it's totally a waste of money paying for them when there are so many free sources out there. The Internet, Google, local library, bar/pub, business gatherings, and more. At one point, I had over 49 different, regular monthly bills. Now? I have exactly 5 bills related to business, and 8 bills related to personal/home use. I no longer subscribe to any magazine, have memberships to any website (except one which is absolutely critical for my business - LogMeIn Rescue), or allow ANY unauthorized charge go by. When I had 49+ regular bills, it was way too easy to overlook fraudulent charges. Just for kicks, I pulled up a few statements from a couple years ago, and actually did find a couple charges that I have no clue about. It's a funny thing - even though I reconcile all of my accounts with QuickBooks, I still let a few charges slip through. I suppose it's no surprise that my client let his charge slip through. He's very wealthy and I am sure has several dozen accounts that he regularly has to keep track of, and untold amounts of subscriptions, memberships, etc.

I'm a believer in keeping things way simple. The more simple, the less things to worry about and therefore the less mistakes are made (as well as less stress!). I only have two business checking accounts, one savings account, and while I do have probably a dozen open lines of credits, I use NONE of them. So really, I am only keeping track of 3 bank accounts, one of which is my high-volume account that I really pay extra attention to in scrutinizing transactions. At my peak, I was struggling to keep track of 3 checking accounts, 2 savings accounts, 2 paypal accounts, 10+ credit card accounts, and a couple car loans. It have managed to whittle all those accounts down to just 4 that I regularly keep track of. I have things set up with all my unused credit card accounts to immediately e-mail me if any charges pop up unannounced.

Ahh, the beauty of simplicity.

You see, there's more to it than just me wanting to save money. I am also extremely sick of consumerism in general. I'm sick of getting junk -- and the same old junk at that -- during Christmas. Instead, I had hoped that my family would be open to doing something together as a family, rather than sitting around like fat Americans gnawing open shiny Christmas presents and getting basically the same old crap that we normally get year in and year out during our massive gift exchanges. Some Christmases were crazy in the past. We would literally get hundreds of these gifts from our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. It's all just meaningless junk. Additionally, my mom has a problem. A big problem, whether she realizes it or not. She's an addict as it is, addicted to cigarettes for as long as I can remember, and never could kick the habit (even after a couple serious prognoses regarding her lungs). She's also a hoarder. What used to be my old bedroom from when I was living there, has become a treasure trove for the hoarder. She has piled from floor to ceiling lots and lots of "collectible antiques" as she likes to call it. To anyone else who's not a hoarder and not an addict, it's all just junk. Seriously -- who needs all that crap? This is why I am the polar opposite of my mother in terms of not wanting anything material whatsoever. I try to avoid material goods like the plague. I am sick and tired of things. Whenever I get something new, it's always something that I will actually use and need on a regular basis. I make a point of removing anything that I no longer need, out of the home. I post it on eBay, give it away, or simply chuck it in the trash if it's broken/worn/unusable at that point. Case in point, I just upgraded our home theater system with Apple TVs in the bedroom and living room at a cost of $99 a piece. I effectively replaced the SageTV network I had going, with two Apple TVs that cost no more than $200. I recently sold just one of the two SageTVs on eBay for $260! I will be posting the second one on eBay soon. I basically got rid of something that paid for the new thing many times over. This is the smart thing to do. Don't just shove old things in a closet, box, attic, or garage because you will forget about it and that's cash that will be long gone as time goes. If you can, swap out the old thing with a new thing that's equal to or less in cost than the old thing. It's better to replace a $500 vaccuum cleaner with a $250 one that ideally performs a lot better than the old one did. And if the old one still works, you could try to fetch $100 off Craigslist for it, and cut down the cost of getting the new thing for nearly half off additional than what you paid for it.

When my iPhone 3GS became unbearable to use (it was slow and totally physically falling apart), I posted it on eBay and got a quick $115 for it. I used that cash towards my new iPhone 4S. Instead of just throwing the iPhone away, I managed to salvage cash out of it. If you look around your home, I bet there are hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in "stuff" that you could probably do without. My golden rule of thumb is, if something is going to be stuffed away in a box in a closet or attic or garage for at least 6 months - try to sell it, donate it, or simply just get rid of it! Frugality means that you have just enough things to keep you happy, content with your Feng Shui surroundings of your home, busy, entertained, and doing so without breaking the bank or making the storage closets bulge on the verge of flooding your home and suffocating you with useless crap. It's also just tacky to hoard things. You've been warned!

Additionally, I hate the way my web hosting business' website looks. I want a complete overhaul - from top to bottom - to position me for the vast Internet market, which is also incredibly saturated and competitive. However, I know it's just a numbers game. Post X number of ads, and get X number of guaranteed clients. All I need is Coupons, a Great Design, Awesome Support, and Wide Array of Features then I have a winner. It's just a numbers game. I posted a job listing on elance.com and after weeding about 30 applicants, I am down to two. The differences between the two are like night and day; yin and yang. One is apparently a "huge" team of developers and designers in India whom collectively grossed over $250k on elance.com alone. The other is a lone guy by the name of Abraham who has quite an impressive design portfolio and was top-notch in communication and ideas during the initial interview. The price tag if I want to hire either one? $2k. I'm torn because I know having a vastly experienced design team would probably get things done quickly, efficiently, and end up being a stellar end game. Or it could be the total opposite of that and everything would just be shit. If I go with the lone hero, it could be a slow, dragged on process of which I'm totally impatient with. It's bad enough I've let this slide for over 3 years now by not having the right kind of website for my business.

Furthermore, I just got a bill from my CPA for $1k. She's a pricey CPA but she's helped me so much with saving money in taxes. She helped me restructure my business as an LLC so I don't get raped with self-employment taxes like I had all these years. In 2008, I paid approximately $35k in taxes. Last year? Just $11k (for both federal and state). And keep in mind, I've made the same revenue and net profit each year since 2007. If you have a business and you're paying Self Employment tax, restructure it as an S Corp or an LLC ASAP! The benefits are tremendous from a protection, tax, and overall business image standpoint. I wish I did this from the outset. I would have at least $150k sitting in my bank account if only I were as smart 5 years ago as I am now. Aside from that point, it just sucks how all these big bills crop up. I owe $2500 in taxes in April, $800 for the California LLC tax, and I still don't have a savings cushion yet.

That's what's got me so down right now. I have all these business goals I want to do, but am severely lacking the patience in saving up my money before jumping into these investments. I am also severely low on cash, as they all just seem to get tied up in A/R so quickly, and have to be reserved in A/P for fast-approaching bills. Case in point: today I had to buy a $1200 server for a client so that's $1200 less cash I have, that instantly gets tied up in A/R until god knows when they'll pay me. This client owes me over $1k from previous jobs this past month too.

I don't know what I'm so afraid of either, because I know in business you do have to spend money to make money. Last year was a struggle because I had to work twice as hard on half the expenditures I was doing. I had to spend extra time reaching out to clients, getting things done all by myself, and reducing the use of outsourcing as much as I could. It was super difficult but I pushed through my goal of becoming debt-free in just a year.

Will I survive this scenario? Keeping up with my bills, while staying out of debt as best as I possibly can, and trying to grow my cash reserves? Just a short 2 years ago, I would have been like "pffft, who cares if you don't have the cash - it's only delaying the inevitable and delaying potential growth further down the line". That's what got me in trouble in the first place with debt, so I'm trying really hard not to make that same mistake again and before I know it, I'll have $3-5k piled up on credit cards all over again!

Time to dig into a Ben and Jerry's Half Baked pint of ice cream so I can feel better.

I laughed my ass off because that is the epic classic example of what probably 95% of all dumb chicks assume as they go through life and hope to meet Mr. Perfect With Shitloads of Money while they focus on beauty and not brains. You can't fix stupid, Ron White once said.

I'm very, very blessed and grateful that my own wife is the complete opposite of that. She was the one who told me I was nuts for using my credit cards and getting into debt, while she has always used cash. It was ME who told her to spend a good sized chunk of her savings on a down payment on that Gas Guzzler truck we had last year. Boy am I lucky to have such a smart woman as the power behind the throne.

Touching upon this dumb chick's subject, "college really isn't necessary"; I do have to concur with her -- to a point. I went to college myself, and graduated a community college with Honors and obtained two degrees -- an AA and an AS in Computer Information Systems. What happened afterwards was what I call a huge mistake and a waste of time. I transferred to Cal Poly Pomona, didn't like it, then transferred to Cal State San Bernardino. By the time I went to CSUSB, I was already earning good cash on the side from my fledgling consulting business. When I sat in a class that was literally called "How to build and maintain your own computer", I had had enough. I simply stopped going to classes and ultimately dropped out.

Like a sheep in the great flock of sheeps, I thought the best path to success in life was to get as high of an educational degree as I possibly could. I even had aspirations of obtaining a Masters in something and/or an MBA. I thought I was going to be like my Dad, a drone in a corporation that gets nice vacation times, a big fat Christmas bonus, and a steady salaried paycheck. Little did I know that I was going to be doing the total opposite of that -- be my own boss and own and operate my own businesses. I became an entrepreneur and for that, you certainly don't need a college education. Look at Bill Gates, or even Mark Zuckerberg and realize that these guys are multi-billionaires and are college dropouts. While one may argue that they did get some sort of education at their college, they still did not graduate and get that piece of paper that supposedly "guarantees career jobs".

I do admit that I am partially successful in business due to some courses I took in my community college. I took courses like business law, which prepared me immensely for all the contracts I have written between clients and myself, and accounting, which helped me learn bookkeeping as I use QuickBooks daily in my business and without basic knowledge of accounting, I would probably be wasting money every month to have to pay someone else to do it all for me, or I would do such a crappy job at it, that my CPA would hate me. Aside from these business prep courses I took, I also took a lot of other courses that ultimately ended up being a complete waste of time. I took more and more general education courses and even most of the IT-related courses were a waste of time since I had learned all the technical stuff on my own.

As a result of my own college experience, and from looking at the world around me, I ultimately feel college is an absolute waste of time, unless you want to be a professional in the areas of medical, law, or some other super-skilled craft that actually requires a university environment to open your skull up and pour your brain with mountains of knowledge on the field. For everything else though -- especially all forms of doing business -- you really don't need a college education. You just need to work hard, use the Internet as your source of education, library, and read read read, as well as gain some hands on experience by freelancing as an intern or apprentice with someone. If I were to hire a tech, I would not hire the guy that came fresh out of college. I would hire the guy that has 2+ years of REAL experience doing tech stuff. To me, this guy is way more valuable than the textbook college student guy because for myself, I didn't really learn as much in CIS courses than I did in actual real hands-on experience.

It saddens me when I see the parking lot of a local college always being full. This isn't even your traditional state university or community college. It's a corporation that has programs designed to get you in and out of there in 10 months or less. They teach people things like pharmaceuticals, dental assistance, massage therapy, and other related "medical" fields. I just know that they people are financing their way through this type of college. If you have to finance your college education, be smart about it. Apply everywhere for scholarships and try everything you can to avoid student loan debt. I was fortunate to have financing for my college education by my parents whom worked at employers who provided this as an employee benefit. My brother had this advantage too and was able to graduate with a BS in business/human resources. However, if I had to pay for it out of my own pocket, I would not have done it because student loan debt is a horrible trap. How shitty is it to have to finance your college education, then when you get done with it and go into your job, you have to work towards paying this debt down in 10, 15, 20 years? Of course you can pay it down faster, like this guy did, but still!