Fact: Having great credit can give you control over your life.
We had a client, Steve, who just didn’t get why a good credit is so important. He had poor credit, so just used cash for all his purchases. As far as he was concerned, having a poor credit score didn’t negatively impact his life at all.
I explained to him that, simply put, a good credit score would allow him to borrow money when he needed to. Whether that was to finance a new car, get approved for a mortgage, or even just to get a credit card that he could use to make online purchases.
He joined the Score Community, ordered a copy of my book and quickly caught on to the concepts of Maximum Use and Doubling Down. But Steve was keen to learn more. He wanted to know how he could accelerate his credit building and build a better financial future even faster.
So, I taught him our third concept for securing his financial future. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. This is the hardest concept to tackle. It’s the concept of The Sour Shot.
Why The Sour Shot? Because it tastes sour going down, but, just like cold medicine, it’s for your own good, and will get you the desired results. It’s the principle of going through all your expenses and cutting one item out a month for the next four months. So four months, four items.
It may seem easy, but it is actually incredibly difficult.
You might think you need to have cable, Internet, gym membership, or those numerous streaming subscriptions. But, you don’t. However, when you decide to cut out Disney Plus and your kids riot – it’s sour! When you cut a monthly gym membership that you rarely use – it’s sour!
But I will tell you this.
When you get to the sixth month and you’re still cutting things out of your budget, now out of habit, you’ll feel like you are winning. I myself still do this once a year every year. I look at our family’s expenses and cut what we don’t need.
So, what do you do with the money you are now saving? You make even more payments towards the balance on whichever card you are currently doubling down on (the one with the highest interest) to exponentially accelerate how fast you pay your credit card off. Paying off even more of the balance on that card will work to improve your overall rating with the credit rating agencies. It’s not rocket science, and it’s not magic. It’s your hard work!
When you start to see your credit score increase and your interest costs go down, all those sour shots will start to taste oh-so sweet.
The concept of The Sour Shot is covered in more detail in Rev. Dr. K Bill Dost’s book “Raise Yourself From Debt to Wealth: Eliminate Debt, Improve Wealth, Build Credit” available for purchase on Amazon.ca
