Welcome to Shakkino! This will be an interesting experiment, and I’m glad to have you with me on the journey.  I ask of you only two things if you wish to follow my progress.

1) Keep me honest, and make sure to ask for specifics if you want to know more.  Why did you need to buy that?  What purpose would that item serve to your goals?

2) Join my journey!  If you can get some knowledge as to how to deal with your own debt, lets do it together.  The purpose of this site is to make my journey public as having the pressure to succeed among your peers is much greater than going it alone.

Debt…it’s a dirty word for most American’s but an unfortunate reality for the majority of us in our 20’s.  I was a little bit of a late adopter to the debt lifestyle but when I started….I just never stopped.  I was able to pay for the first couple years of my college, but with tuition hikes and not being able to cover all the tuition anymore…in came the “soft, fuzzy, not a big deal” student loans.  This was the first time I had borrowed more money than I could possibly pay back in a year.  The amount of cash they would give you was always more than the tuition..but I wasn’t going to say no to cash with 0% interest and no payments.  I took every dollar that the student loans would allow.  I even used the excess cash to try to start a car importing business (that failed hard…I can write about that in the future if you really want to know).  The cash was used for computers, electronics, buying a car, etc.  The lack of having to pay made it the best part of my year when I could get more student loan cash.  I’m sure a couple of you out there had the same feelings.  Being that Accounting was my major in school…Seemed like I was doing the right thing since everything was accrual’s rather than actual cash.  <– You can see the beginning of the problem. More >