My experiment to see what would happen to me physically and mentally if converted to a "healthy" lifestyle of a proper diet and exercise for 30 days worked out quite well. What was intended to be an experiment for 30 days, turned into 60, 90, and so on. At the end of this week, it will be 147 days! I have lost 50.8 pounds. I have lost 4 inches from my waist. I am still eating 'right' and exercising normally. I can now run for hour straight without stopping. My endurance is at an all time high, and I am on top of my game in hockey.

While it is incredibly easy to maintain a healthy lifestyle, I still do not see me keeping it up forever, although I do not see the experiment stopping any time soon. It just seems rather unlikely that I would keep doing anything in particular for years on end.

Ok, so for my next stunt, I am going to attempt to reduce my debt. I have posted many times my thoughts on debt in general. For years, I just got the credit card bills in the mail, didn't even look at them, just paid whatever amount, and went on with my business. I have enough financial assets to cover the debt, so it was never a big deal, I could pay it all off by converting some assets to cash if I needed to for some reason, so good times. Slowly over time, the debt has somehow begun to piss me off. I seem to be obsessing about it daily. I am not exactly sure why this happened, but it has. I do not want to interfere with any existing investments to cover the debt, so my plan is to leave then all intact, and find other methodologies of debt reduction.
So, once I organized the debt, and shifted a few things around, I pay around 100$ a month in finance charges. This may sound like a lot, but considering before, I was paying 350-400$ a month in charges, 100$ is not all that bad.

Ok, so step 1 is out of the way. Essentially by rotating all debts one card to the left using balance transfers; I was able to get most of the debt to a 0% interest rate. Once the balance transfer rate expires, I just shuffle the deck again. The cards I have feature really low fees on transfers, and I only need to do it once a year.

Step 2 is save money by reducing my dependence on foreign oil. As I have posted before, I spend 350-400$ a month on gas. Well, screw the Arab nations, and screw the gas companies. I am now doing my daily commute on my motorcycle, where I get around 75 miles per gallon, instead of 15 in my truck. This comes out to about an 80% reduction in gas consumed. I will still have to use my truck for going to hockey, grocery shopping, and during inclement weather, but factoring in those events, I should still be able to save a MINIMUM of $150 a month in gas costs. That alone covers the finance charges each month and adds 50 extra dollars to the cause.

Step 3 is one that is necessary due to human nature. Each month, on the day before I get paid, I send every penny in my checking account to the credit card company. I find that if I keep any "extra" money in the checking account, I will probably spend it. I have lived for years in a "cashless society" as I call it. I do not use cash, and haven't for years. If there is money in your pocket, you are more likely to use it because it is there. So, when I get paid, I go down the list of bills I have to pay that month, credit card bills and otherwise, and pay them, and then I pay myself by moving money into savings, moving some to investments, etc... Then whatever is left over just sits there until the day before pay day, at which points, boom, an extra payment on the credit card.

Step 4 is to stop spending. I buy shit all the time. I enjoy buying stuff, but the more I get involved with getting rid of debt, the more it makes me sick to even think about buying stuff. So starting in a few days, I am going to either stop buying stuff, or at least pick and choose my purchases more wisely. If my choices are to buy event tickets, or something I will own for 10 years, I will go with option B.

Step 5 is to be more frugal around the house with grocery shopping, energy usage, water usage, etc... This one is more experimental than other steps. It would be interesting if using coupons, shutting off unused electronics, and things of that nature really do save much money. I have a theory that they don't, so we shall see.

Step 6 will kick in a few months from now, if I am not happy with my progress. I plan to reduce 401k contributions to 0% for 12 months. I already lowered it from 8% to 4% last year for the effort. Since the economy is really in the shitter, it makes sense to use the money now, to be in a better position in the future. Once the economy turns back around, the existing assets should be enough to gain an additional 5 or 6 grand in a year, even at modest returns.

So there is the plan in a nutshell. Steps 2 and 6 alone should be enough to pay in maybe 500 bucks more a month than I do now. I think it may be unrealistic and perhaps unhealthy to set goals in this scenario. I figure if I can pay between around $1000 a month towards debt, I should be able to knock it out pretty quick. I can't wait to see how it goes.