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Today is an episode of TSP Rewind, commercial free versions of past podcast episodes.

Today’s episode was originally, Episode-438- What Debt Freedom Means and was first published on May 19th 2010.

The following are the original show notes from that episode.

Yesterday I made my second large purchase of the year, a 2005 F-350 Diesel Super Duty I got for 30% under its Kelly Blue Book Value, I paid cash.  Earlier this year I bought a new RV (a Shamrock 21ss) I also paid cash.  I almost feel guilty about this but it got me thinking, 8 years ago my wife and I sate down face in hands looking at over 25K in credit card debt, medical bills (which grew before they shrank) and more.

We thought “how did we let this happen”, we thought about just letting things keep going and paying a “little bit more” on a few debts.  Our income was great, our house payment was low, it would all be okay, a meeting with a “financial liar” confirmed it wold be fine.  The liar even suggested we take out some home equity since we had so much if we were worried about low cash reserves.

In my head the wisdom of my grandmother screamed out over the words of this clown who had the arrogance to claim he understood money.  My wife and I began a journey, one many of you have followed as well.  I have discussed he journey and the how and why behind it, yet until today I have never discussed the freedom that lies on the other side.

In January I walked away from a six figure salary to do TSP full time.  It was a hard choice but we had paid all debt by that point and began saving money heavily.  We jumped from stocks before the crash and had not taken the hit.  Something totally unexpected occurred though, despite a massive reduction in my income, we actually seem to now have more money.

I have started to really understand why this is the case and a lot of your “post debt” emails took on a new meaning for me as of yesterday.  So today while I will talk a bit about debt, I am going to talk far more about what completing the journey will mean.  If you are going fight a difficult battle you need to realize what victory will mean.