183. How to Survive the Middle of Your Debt-Free Journey (Without Quitting)

The beginning of debt payoff is exciting… and then the middle hits. The “easy wins” are gone, the progress feels slower, and suddenly you’re exhausted and tempted to quit. If that’s you, you’re not broken—you’re normal. And you can finish.

In this episode, I’m sharing what no one tells you about the middle of the debt payoff journey—and the practical mindset shifts that keep families moving forward even when motivation disappears.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• Why the middle feels so hard (and why it doesn’t mean your plan isn’t working)
• The difference between motivation and the decision to keep going
• How to use “mile markers” and small celebrations to stay consistent
• What to do when surprise expenses hit (and how a starter emergency fund reduces the panic)
• How to pause debt payoff without going backward into new debt
• How to spot lifestyle creep and “we deserve it” spending before it derails your progress
• How to talk about money with your spouse without turning it into a fight
• How to include your kids in the journey without scaring them

If you’re looking for a meaningful way to teach your kids healthy money habits while you’re getting your own house in order, my picture book Rosie Earns It Herself is designed to help you start those conversations early and often. Preorder now at AccelerateYourLegacy.com/rosie.

Learn more about working with Laura Sexton

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Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants-30 0:00

Hello, my legacy builders. Today we are gonna talk about what no one tells you about money in the middle of the debt payoff journey. I know how you're feeling in the beginning. It was so fun. It was so exciting. We were doing great and now it just feels exhausting and I do not want to continue. I've been there. Hey guys. This is Laura Sexton, your Money and Legacy coach, and I am all about helping you make everyday money feel easy. Whether we're talking about paying off debt, building wealth, or learning, that legacy means the habits, tools, and mindset that you leave behind. I'm here to help you on your money journey. I've been talking to a lot of people who were gung-ho about paying off debt at the beginning of January, January one. We're so excited we're gonna pay off debt in 365 days. This was a trend that was huge I have to tell you, I know exactly when they are going to start struggling because I've watched it with hundreds of families. They get so excited, so gung-ho, and then we are in the middle. There's no more things to sell. There's no more giant chunks to knock off, and now we just have to slog. It is completely normal to lose motivation in the middle of your debt payoff. But let me tell you. Big life changes don't come from your motivation. Big life changes come from your decision to keep going. I get really frustrated with this January motivation feeling because I have it too. I have big goals, big dreams. My January is huge. You know, I'm gonna climb this and I'm gonna climb that. I'm gonna do all these things. And then we get to the middle of February and I'm no longer feeling it. Mm-hmm. Nope. Don't like it. Don't wanna do it anymore. It's hard. One of my goals this year is to make sure the sink in my kitchen is completely cleared before I go to bed. That's really hard. When I get up before four o'clock in the morning and I deal with five little people all day long and I run a business and I have a husband and I have a house to clean and I have to make dinner and, and, and it's a lot. I'm not motivated to do the dishes in the evening. It doesn't feel fun to me when I would really like to sit down on my bed and read a book or play on my iPad, but you know what? Motivation's not what gets me to do it. My commitment to myself and my knowledge that that brings joy to my husband to wake up to a clean kitchen. That's what gets me off my butt and into the kitchen so I can get those things done. Motivation is a feeling. Your decision to keep moving is your next right thing, but maybe you're like, all right, Laura, I hear you, but look. The progress is getting really slow. Things aren't happening. I know, I know.'cause in the beginning you were super gung ho. You were selling stuff, you were taking on extra work, you weren't as tired as you are right now, I get it. But the plan is still working even if the progress feels slower. You have a plan, you have a roadmap to get to where you want to go. If you get off the road, it will take you longer, I promise. If you follow the plan and you keep going, you are still making progress, even if the progress feels slow. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Do not get off the path. Keep moving forward. Sometimes progress feels really slow, but because you are diligent and you continue to work, little blessings show up. Also, sometimes we need to put mile marker destinations in our roadmap, and when we reach those. We celebrate, we do something to encourage our spirit because if the only thing I'm looking at is the end point, it can get very difficult, but if I can put smaller little celebrations along the way, it gets easier and easier. So I'm not going to that mountain peak over there. I'm going to that rock right there. I'm going to that tree. I'm running up this mountain, but I'm not only looking at the top, I'm looking at the next thing. As soon as I get there, I'm gonna feel a little bit better. As soon as I get there, I'm gonna stop and rest. As soon as I get there, I'm going to celebrate. It's not just the end of the road, it's not just the top of the mountain. It's the next spot where it's logical to stop and celebrate. If you're paying off debts and you have a lot of little debts, great, let's pay off a lot. When you pay off$6,000, you can celebrate. It doesn't have to be round numbers, it doesn't have to be anything like that. I know when we were slogging through in the beginning, just getting the debts paid off felt good. But in the beginning, we were paying off so many credit cards that we were paying off one a month, and then we could celebrate at the end of every month because we had another one down. It felt good, but when you have these longer drawn out ones, my student loans were$150,000. That was hard because that's a long time. Before you can celebrate, so we had to put things in there. Every$10,000 we had pizza night with the kids, things like that are good to put in place to enjoy. But sometimes life happens. So what do we do when a surprise expense shows up or we have multiple surprise expenses? Well, we try to hedge our bets here and we try to keep the sting off by putting up some Murphy repellent. Now, if you've ever heard of Murphy, Murphy's Law says anything that can go wrong will. When you're in debt, when you're living paycheck to paycheck, it feels like everything is an emergency. Everything is a surprise. So we need to look out in the future and you need to look in the past, what came outta my checking account a year ago this month? Go look at that. Go look at things that you spent. Are there expenses that are coming up in March? You can go ahead and plan for'em. My husband's birthday's in March. I have one of my daughter's birthdays in March. I know that I'm gonna have bigger birthday expenses in March. I have to plan for that. I have to be prepared. But still, sometimes surprises are gonna show up. So you do wanna have a starter emergency fund of around a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars is not gonna cover every emergency, but I can guarantee you it has covered every emergency. I've had recently gotten a little fender bender that costs me$958. That was under a thousand. I paid it off and I put that money back in the account. Now when you have bigger things happen, sometimes we have to pause our debt pay off so that we can take care of those things. And that's okay. It's okay to pause, but if you are chunking 1500, 3000 extra dollars a month, and I do have some clients that are like 10,000 extra dollars a month. They are blessed with a very large income and I'm very excited for them as they are chunky through a large amount of debt payoff. But if you are paying 1500, 2000, 3000 extra dollars every month towards your debts and an emergency happens, you pause those payoffs so that you can cover whatever is happening. Most places have a 30 day pay. It's not due immediately. It's not like, oh, you broke your arm. We're gonna put it in this cast, but you can't leave until after it's paid for. That's not how that works. They bill you and you have 30 days to pay it. That said, if an emergency comes up, yes, you pause the debt payoff and you focus on the emergency. You don't want to go backwards. By saying, okay, I have an emergency. I'm just gonna put it on a credit card and I'll pay it off later.'cause then you're adding a penalty to your emergency. That's not what we want. Same thing when you're having a baby. Okay? If you know that you are going to have a baby, that means you have nine months to stack up as much cash as you can. You pay minimums on everything and you save up until that baby and that mama are home and healthy. Delivery goes a whole lot easier when you pay cash for the delivery and you're not stressed about money. I promise my first one a lot more stressful than my fifth one, and that was because I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if I paid the money ahead of time, I didn't have to worry about it. I could do whatever I wanted. I did find out, and I did not know this, I did find out that you get paid for the mommy slushie, like the mocktail that they bring you. You have to pay like$45 for cranberry and Sprite. But you know what? After that delivery worth it, I'll buy another one next time I'm there. It's so good. So let's say we had to pause for an emergency and now we really need to get back on track. But they're these sneaky little things that come in and they're little saboteurs and they're coming in and they're messing with your plan. You paused the debt payoff because you were saving for a baby, or there was an emergency that happened, and now instead of putting everything back on their debt, you're like, well, what if I go ahead and add in this little luxury here, or what if I just add in, I'll just increase my, my fun money every month. I'll just increase my going out to eat budget. I'll just increase my nails budget. I'll just, and you start to increase, increase, increase, and you start doing this little lifestyle creep spending thing again, I want to caution you too frequently. Look at your budget and decide, is this a want or is it a need? If you cannot do that for yourself, calling somebody like me, a financial coach, who can sit down and look at it completely objectively, I have no emotional feelings towards your money and what you're spending. I can tell you objectively, Hey, you're starting to creep up in this category and we need to keep an eye out for that. Keep. Here's another sneaky saboteur that I want to go ahead and point out. We deserve it. We deserve it. We should go out to eat tonight'cause we deserve it. We've been working hard now if you plan it. I told you, you can put those little celebrations in with your debt payoff. If you hit those milestones, then yes, you do deserve to follow through with your commitment and you committed to celebrate. Now, I'm not talking big, ridiculous celebration. We're not going to the Caribbean'cause we paid off a credit card. Okay? But you can have. Pizza and beer night, if that's what you wanna do, you can pop a bottle of champagne. We hit that milestone. We're so excited. That's okay. But you have to do that without blowing the plan. If it is an unexpected expense and you are tired, let's say one night, you're just tired, so you start browsing Amazon, which they make the most money between eight and 9:00 PM did you know that it's'cause you're tired? It's because you're hungry. It's because you're lonely. Any of those feelings will make you want to buy. And so they make a lot of money between eight and 9:00 PM But let's say one night you are tired and you're hungry and you're just in bed and you're kind of lethargic and you're just hanging out and you're like scrolling and you see something and you're like, oh, totally deserve that. No, you don't. Add it to a list. That's what it's called. Add it to a list for a future purchase and make that your celebration in the future. If we do that and we don't just buy it in the one click here, I got it coming tomorrow. If you do that, you're probably not gonna want it tomorrow When you're feeling, fed. You're not lonely, you're not tired. You probably don't actually want that thing. So putting some guardrails and some parameters on yourself is a really good idea. Go ahead. If you have an Amazon scrolling problem, go ahead and delete the app. If you have a buy now, pay later situation. Stop that. I said what I said. I sometimes get the question, what do I do if my spouse and I aren't equally committed? This can be really difficult. If you were previously committed and the both of you were going really hard in the paint and you guys were really knocking it out, and then one of you's kind of pulling back, let's talk about that. Let's figure out why. Is there something that is causing the disconnect? We need to hit that head on. And that's one of the reasons why we set up things like our weekly family meetings where we go through the business of the family and we make sure that everything's moving forward. But sometimes we get tired and sometimes I know for a fact that my husband was like, I don't wanna work overtime anymore. He was working so many days in a row, and when he was working overtime, that meant I was home. Alone with the kids more. And that's really hard. It can get really tough. It can, but that's when we need to go back and figure out why we started this in the first place. Why is this important to us? For our family? We got out of debt because I wanted to be the first link in a new chain. My husband had been out of debt a couple of times in his life, we had not established a pattern of living that way. And so when I came around with my credit cards, he's like, yeah, sure, whatever. And he started using his credit cards again. When we committed, we knew that we wanted to make sure that our children were never stressed about money. We wanted to make sure that our children had everything that we could possibly give them. Now, I can't give them everything. And I don't wanna give them everything. If you go back and listen to last week's episode, I really don't want my kids to be entitled, and I know that I have to make them work for things, and I have to give them the dignity of growing. But on those days where it was hard, sometimes it's okay to take a break. But if you don't communicate that with your spouse and you're just pulling back and you just decide you don't wanna do it anymore, that becomes a problem. So you wanna make sure that you have those conversations and you get back to being committed. And sometimes that means for a season we give a hundred percent, and sometimes for a season we give 60. But we don't just turn it off. But the biggest way to turn this into a giant fight is to stop talking about it, to stop having these open, honest conversations. Setting up the rhythm of a weekly family business meeting means that you have to talk about it, and you're talking about it on neutral territory at a time that both of you agree on when you've both eaten, so you're not cranky or hangry. Make sure that you're doing it in a good way. But if you talk about it often, and it doesn't mean you talk about it every single day, every single time you talk to them, it's not like you're picking up your phone, like you're like, Hey hun, how's work? Did you make extra money today? Like, we're not doing that. But we keep a rhythm of having these conversations so they don't turn into fights. If he comes home and he went to lunch with his friends at work and he got to go out to lunch, but you didn't get to go out to lunch and now you're feeling hurt because he spent the going out to eat money and that was not something you had agreed upon, and he'd already spent all of his fun money, he's spending extra money. You've been home with the kids all the time and you're not getting anything. That is not the time to have the conversation because you were angry. Calm yourself down and then go have the conversation using I statements. I was really hurt that you went out to eat with your friends and so I didn't get to go out to eat. I was really hurt, not you hurt me when you didn't know I was hurt. I was uncomfortable. I'm feeling left out. I'm feeling left behind. Use I statements and that will keep your money. Talks from turning into fights. Rules that you should decide on now so that you don't quit later. Depend on what your goals are, but let's say our only goal is paying off debt. Great. Decide now. We don't ever use debt again, ever, because I'm not gonna work this hard just for us to go backwards. Decide right now how often we go out to eat. Decide right now what kind of fun money you're gonna give to each other because you need some blowing off steam. Decide what your next milestone goal is. Decide how we're gonna celebrate when we get there. If you need a reset plan because you have drifted off. I don't like resets to be completely honest, but there are a lot of people that are like, I need, you know, we are gonna reset, we're gonna level set, we're gonna get back on track. Just take the next right step. You don't need to sit down and revamp everything, and we'll try again next month. No, no, no. Start again right now. Decide what it is you want most and then go after that. Do not let what you want right now, make you give up what you want most. Finally, how do we talk about our kids without scaring them? How do we talk to our kids about debt payoff without scaring them? We are honest. And we tell them, Hey, mommy and daddy made some mistakes with money, but we're fixing that sometimes it means we're getting completely radical and we're taking them out of sports, and it means we're gonna sell a car and it means we're going to make giant life shifts. That's okay. You can shift. Shifting is good. You want to bring them in on the conversation if it is developmentally appropriate. You don't go to a 2-year-old and go, Hey, mommy, daddy made mistakes with money, and so now you're not gonna get to go to Disneyland ever again. That's not true, first of all. And second of all, that's intentionally manipulating them so that you feel better. We're not doing that, but. Bring them in on the conversation, show them what making a budget looks like, have them be a part of it so that you guys can learn and grow together. My girls are selling Girl Scout cookies, and I was telling them the different ways that they could pay for cookies, and we have made it a point saying we take cards. And we say it that way because I'm not going to turn away a credit card for Girl Scout cookies because there are other girls that are selling with us and I don't want to harm the other girls because my girls don't use a credit card. But we're not going to promote putting it on a credit card. So my kids will say, we take card or Venmo. If you don't have cash and you go to a grocery store and the girls are like, would you like to buy some Girl Scout cookies? And you're like, oh, I don't have any cash. Got you. We take Venmo, we got you. We can, we can make it happen. We wanna make sure that we bring them into the conversation. My kids know we don't do debt, we don't do credit cards because we don't take on credit. We don't have a credit score. But we want to talk to them because we want them to learn that in our family, we don't owe money to other people. That is something that's very important to us. We are gonna tell them, Hey, we do have a mortgage, so now we do owe money to this mortgage company, and we are bringing them into that conversation on a developmental level, my oldest one we're gonna talk about, okay, we're paying this off this month and this is gonna go towards this, and this goes to principal and this goes to interest. And why is that so high? And why is more money go to interest than principal? And we're gonna explain these things to them. But we're also not gonna harp on it, and I think that's a key point. We don't need to knock'em over the head with it and bash it in and bash in and bash it in. We don't have to talk about it all the time. Talk about it occasionally, make sure that if they have a money question, it's okay to come and ask you. We didn't talk about it because it didn't come up more than that. One day a month I. And I could be wrong, but I know with my kids, we talk about money a lot. Now, part of that's because I'm a money coach and I like talking about money. I have a lot of fun. I talk about my work. I tell them how much fun I have when I get to work with my clients. We don't wanna scare them, but we do wanna invite them into the conversation. If you were looking for a meaningful way to teach your kids about money while you're getting your own house in order, a really great way to do that is to. Get my book, Rosie errs it herself. It is all about teaching them the dignity of working, and it's going to help you start having some of these money conversations by reading it in a book. You can just sit down and have this conversation. You can pre-order the book right now on my website, accelerate your legacy.com/rosie. If this is before May 27th, if you're listening to this after May 27th. Go pick it up. Go ahead and, grab that book and then also that will lead you into some really cool free resources that I will be giving away because I want you to have these conversations and I want you to be enjoying your money conversations with your kids. So. That was a lot. And I hope that it benefited and blessed some of you. That's it for this week. Legacy Builders go out and make a difference. I.