clearing creative debt
This was originally posted on my Patreon, here.
At 28 years old, I had to rebuild my life.
My girlfriend of almost four years left me. When she left her son, my stepson left too. So did most of the furniture. There was a gapping hole left in my life and in my heart.
I was sleeping on a secondhand single mattress on the floor, working a job I hated (with her mother!), and I was $11,000 in debt. For the first few months, my days were sad and slow and anxiety fueled. Not knowing what to do, I turned to books and YouTube videos, and blogs that promised the secrets of turning your life around.
Obviously, anyone who has tried to turn their life around this way would know that success is sporadic at best.
There was so much shit out there. Just utter shit. People telling me what I should do, the absolute best way to fix my problems, the hacks and tips and tricks that would make my life easy. But the real secret is that life isn't easy and that doing hard things makes it worthwhile. Even if it sucks.
Dave Ramsey's Total Money Make Over is surprisingly the reason I am writing today.
It's an American book, so some things it talks about weren't useful to me. But the Snowball Method of paying off debt was, quite literally, life changing for me.
Snowball Method for Money
I had 11k debt on loans and credit cards (don't get credit cards if you can avoid it). That debt needed to be cleared if I wanted to create a new life.
Here is Dave's explanation of how this works:
The debt snowball method is a debt-reduction strategy where you pay off debt in order of smallest balance to largest balance, gaining momentum as you knock out each balance. When the smallest debt is paid in full, you roll the minimum payment you were making on that debt into the next-smallest debt payment.
Here’s how the debt snowball works:
Step 1: List your debts from smallest to largest (regardless of interest rate).
Step 2: Make minimum payments on all your debts except the smallest debt.
Step 3: Throw as much extra money as you can on your smallest debt until it’s gone.
Step 4: Take what you were paying on your smallest debt and add that to your payment on the next-smallest debt until it’s gone too.
Step 5: Repeat until each debt is paid in full and you’re completely debt-free!
Using this method, getting a second job, and doing lots of hanging at home, I paid off my debt in about 12 months.
Why the fuck am I talking about this on my TTRPG blog?
Snowball Method for Creative Debt
I am currently in a time of life where time is more scarce than ever. Two small children, fulltime work, a house to maintain, a family to care for, etc. But writing is my bucket filler. Putting words down and getting them out of head clears my mind in a way that nothing much else does.
My current time constraints mean that while I have the need to write I don't have the time. I also have so many little projects on the go that when I get the time, I am often at a loss for what to do. Over the last 12 months, I think I have started 10 to 15 creative projects. Some tiny, but others are much larger and none of them seemed to move forward.
Recently, I was gifted an entire Saturday to do what I liked. I worked on some creative projects. And I did that by applying the Snowball Method to my creative detritus.
Here's how the Creative Debt Snowball works:
Step 1: Figure out how much you time you have in a week or a single session to work on creative tasks.
Step 2: List all the creative projects that you currently have going on. Then cull that list to 3 to 5 items that you want to work on.
Step 3: Rank those you want to work on from least work to go to most work to go.
Step 4: Allocate 50% of your time to the smallest project and 10% to the remaining.
Step 5: When the smallest is finished, move that time to the next smallest, giving it 60% of your time.
Step 6: Repeat until each project is completed in full and you’re completely debt-free!
My list looked like this:
OzORC Sticker - design, feedback, print
Amaryn - edit, layout, upload
Wormjuice - writing 3 locations, send email
Bibliotecs - Editing pass, refine setting, harass people with it
Harrigan Hill - Writing
I knocked the top two off during my session on that Saturday and then the others all got some attention.
My list is now:
Wormjuice - writing 3 locations, send email
Bibliotecs - Editing pass, refine setting, harass people with it
Harrigan Hill - Writing
So, next week I'll have 3 hours of time across thee week to work on these things. Wormjuice will get 80% and the others will get %10 each until Wormjuice is done, then Bibliotecs becomes the key focus. Ideally in about a month Harrigan Hill, a novel, will get all my attention. My debts wiped, my mind happy, my conscience clear.
I don't know if this is helpful, but it's here.
It was also not on my list of creative debt, which happens.
Long days and pleasant nights.
Also, Amaryn Smoulders was completed and you can get it on Amazon now: https://mybook.to/Amaryn
Give it some love.