Choking On Our Debts
As someone that has been involved in personal finance for many years now, I have always recommended clients and prospects seriously look at their debt as one of the main things to attack while at the same time building a safe, solid retirement plan other than counting on Social Security. In November of 2012 a colleague of mine lent me a book named The Retirement Miracle by Patrick Kelly. This first chapter of this powerful book opened my eyes to the extent at which the US Government has pulled the wool over American Citizens eyes regarding our National Debt.
What if I told you our National Debt wasn't $16.5 Trillion, but was actually closer to $80 Trillion? I wouldn't have believed it without further research. Our country is choking on it's own debt and is slowly dying because of it.
“Congress doesn’t even know what the real numbers are,” said Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tennessee. “The real national debt isn’t $16 trillion. I wish it were that low. The real national debt is closer to $60 or $80 trillion.”
When it comes to generally accepted accounting practices the Government has required individuals and businesses to follow very strict practices and guidelines. However, like everything else politicians and Government enforce, they opted themselves out of certain rules. The reason was best explained in a USA Today article with these words:
"The reason for the discrepancy: Accounting standards require corporations and state governments to count new financial obligations, even if the payments will be made later. The federal government doesn't follow that rule. Instead of counting lifetime benefits for programs such as Social Security, the government counts the cost of benefits for the current year."
The article details more about how the accounting really adds up to $61.7 Trillion. Of course that was back in May of 2009 so things have gotten better, right? Wrong! The Government has continued to increase it spending while taking in less and less money from taxes.
So how big is a Trillion Dollars? If you started trying to count to a trillion it would take you nearly 32,000 years to do so. That means a cave man back in 30,000 BC would have started counting until modern day to reach a trillion.
There are 86,400 seconds in a day, 31,536,000 in a year. Now times that by 1,000,000,000,000. These numbers are so big we have a hard time even wrapping our minds around them. Now times that by $16.5 Trillion and you have the perceived National Debt. That would take 500,000+ years to count out. Now do the math on what $72,000,000,000,000 would take. I will leave that up to you. After all I have an article to keep writing.
You can watch the amount add up on http://truthinaccounting.org/. Viewers discretion is advised and also don't look directly at the numbers for too long or you will go blind.
You might be asking yourself, what can I do about it? There are a few things you can do. First, make sure you are doing all you can to be someone that is pulling the cart and not sitting in the cart being pulled. Make sure you are contributing. Second, you can write your government representatives and demand they work to fix the problem. Third, and perhaps most important, you can work on your own debt situation. After all our nation is made up of hundreds of millions of households. Each house we strengthen, strengthens the Nation we love.
What is your personal and family debt situation? How long would it take to count out your debt? Is there a way to count faster and get rid of your debt faster? Yes! Did you know that most people can be completely debt free significantly faster than they believe? You see all debt is given based off ratios. So unless your income has significantly changed you can use these same ratios to get back out of debt faster.
Most debt plans I help people build get them completely debt free, including their house, in 12 years or less. It is all about ratios so the math usually works out about the same for everyone. Take a second to add up how much you pay in debt payments each month. Of those payments, how much is going to interest that you will never see again? Now imagine you are completely debt free, but you still have the amount of money you were putting towards debt to now do investing. How would that change your life?
Are you ready to change your life? I have a client that simply wasn't ready to change. He was so embarrassed of his debt and circumstances that he put on a show about his lifestyle that made him feel like a huge hypocrite. Once we got his plan in place, he felt a huge burden lifted from his shoulders.
Bring the future to the present with me for a moment. When you look into the future and you see the life you dream to have, are you really going to get there with all the debt you are carrying? Would it be easier if you unpacked some debt from your life?
"I find it fascinating that most people plan their vacations with better care than they do their lives. Perhaps that is because escape is easier than change." -Jim Rohn
There is a way to get completely debt free in one third the normal time and I am happy to show it to you. Strengthen your house and strengthen this great nation.
Cheers,
Stephen Gardner
888-638-0080
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