How I paid off my bond in 5 years and how you can too – part 1

House best-083

I’ve been promising to write this post for a few months, so if you’ve been waiting, thanks for your patience.

None of the things I’m about to share is so-called “rocket science” but I do believe that all of it added together is bond magic.

A little bit of background:

D and I have been married for 21 years. During that time we’ve lived in 5 places, 4 of them owned.

It’s also worth mentioning that we went house-hunting after two years of married life, discovered to our shock and horror that you needed a lot more money than we had saved, so we continued renting for another year to save up some more money and eventually bought after 3.5 years.

Interesting aside – that first move was done with the help of friends and D said then that in future we need to pay for professional movers because if we can’t afford to do that, we can’t afford to move 🙂 So that’s what we’ve done ever since.

House best-069

On debt

Supposedly there’s good debt and bad debt. I say no debt is good debt but some debt is a tiny bit better than others.

In a nutshell, I hate having debt. I even hate owing a colleague R6 if they bought me a packet of chips at the vending machine. So when I see lots of zeros on a bank statement, I go into action and devise a plan to pay that off as quickly as possible.

Our plan is always to pay off a home comfortably in 8 years (we take bonds of 20 years), but my not-so-secret stretch plan is 5 years. We’ve done it twice, and we will do it again with this house.

Let’s get to it, shall we?

41 things

  1. Tithe on every bit of income

We are tithers and tithe 10% off the gross of every single bit of income. Salaries, bonuses, gifts from family for birthdays, proceeds from house sales, when I sell stuff around the house, everything. We’ve tithed for nearly 23 years and we will never not tithe.

I believe that when you give God the firstfruits of all your income, He blesses the rest and stretches it.

As with almost everything else, I like to be very intentional about my tithe. Once my salary hits my bank account, I don’t spend any money until I’ve paid my tithe (except for my one retirement annuity that takes their premium even before I’ve been paid some months…). I’ve automated payments to the nanny, the kids’ school, etc. but not my tithe because I want to physically go into my bank account, see my “abundance”, feel grateful to God, and consciously and intentionally tithe. Most months I tithe from the banking app on my phone so this doesn’t take much time at all but it is still very intentional and conscious.

I’m a big tithing enthusiast because I’ve firsthand seen the benefits over the years and there is nobody who can convince me otherwise.

Coaching challenge for the comments

Do you tithe?

On a scale of 1 – 10, how badly do you “hate” debt? 1 is “not much”; 10 is “I hate it as much as you do, Marcia”

I’m not intentionally making you wait for the whole series, but the whole thing was over 2000 words long, so I’m breaking it up into 4 posts, one on each Thursday for the rest of the month.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

Comments

  1. I HATE debt and have been trying my utmost for a very long time to get out of it.
    I haven’t been tithing lately. It shows! Because my money is just NEVER ENOUGH. It’s DEFINITELY starting up again this month.

  2. I used to be good with my tithing but of late things have gotten VERY tight and I’ve been doing more of an “offering” and using my service to the church as my “tithe”. I know its incorrect but we have just not been making ends meet. I know it’s because I’m not tithing properly.

  3. I too can attest to the faithfulness of God when you’re a faithful tither! Thanks for this xx

  4. I can testify to the blessings that come with tithings!!

    I hate debt so much so I preferred to drive a car we could afford almost debt free. A car loan to me is a bad debt. Owing more than the car is worth the minute you drive the car out of the showroom

  5. DEIRDRE VOLANIE says

    What an inspiration. I also believe in tithing to give what belongs to the Lord, he will bless you more and more.

Trackbacks

  1. […] If you missed part 1, you can catch up on reading it here. […]

  2. […] part 1 which lays the foundation and mindset stuff, and here’s part 2 which is the start of all the practical […]

  3. […] part 1 which lays the foundation and mindset stuff, here’s part 2 which is the start of all the practical steps, and here’s part 3 with […]

Leave a Reply to MrsFF Cancel reply

*

WP2Social Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com