On Nov 1st, BeatingDebt.org will be moving the blog, Beating Debt News, from the servers at WordPress.com to our own servers.  Currently, the address to our blog is blog.beatingdebt.org.  We will continue to keep the old address up and running in order to provide the knowledge and resources found on that web address.   However, on Nov 1st, we will move the blog to

http://www.articles.beatingdebt.org

Please update all links to this new address.

I would appreciate any feedback you may have about the new design.

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Volunteer or Donate to Help Convince More People To Stay Away From Debt.

Show others how much you’ve beaten debt
for the price of one latte a year. – – Beating Debt Charts

On October 25, 2009, Eric Swanson, Executive Director of BeatingDebt.org, ran 26.2 miles in the 34th Marine Corps Marathon.  Wearing the Team BDO shirt, he ran to raise awareness of the growing addiction to overspending and personal debt among Americans.

Team BDO has a $50 minimum donation amount to run with one of the BDO shirts.  Below is a short list of other organizations and their minimums to run for their charity.

Eric did however create a goal of $2620 to help support BDO place more educational advertisements to warn people against overspending and going into more debt.  He was able to raise $139.

Getting ready to run the MCM

The race went very well for Eric as he finished the race around 4 hours.  The weather was brisk and the route was mostly flat for the final 16 miles.  He was challenged in the beginning because he joined the 4:30 group at the start of the marathon.  This meant that there were many people ahead of him, increasing the congestion among the 35,000 people that ran that day.  Not until mile 7 was Eric able to start swerving between people and make up some time.  Additionally, the lines for the restrooms were extremely long in the beginning, so by Eric stopping at mile 4 caused a 15 minute delay in his run time as well.  After mile 7, Eric seemed to have a boost of energy because he stepped up the pace and was able to quickly make up time without hitting his “wall” or sustaining injuries.  The Lord blessed in all aspects of this marathon, from great training to a motivating, injury free run.  Overall, it was a great time to get out in the nation’s capital and run for BeatingDebt.org.

Just finished the MCM

If you would like to make a final donation, please click the link below.

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Volunteer or Donate to Help Convince More People To Stay Away From Debt.

Show others how much you’ve beaten debt
for the price of one latte a year. – – Beating Debt Charts

By The Onion

Vaughn and O’Brien, however, are only two of several thousand performers currently engaged in elaborately deceptive schemes designed to trick the TV-viewing public. Known for their striking good looks and charming personalities, these men and women will reportedly do anything in their power to hoodwink average citizens into watching their latest romantic comedy, network prime-time show, or low-budget made-for-TV movie.

“Why is Vince Vaughn doing this?” asked Baltimore housewife Beth Delbanco, 46. “Time and again, from Fred Claus to Four Christmases, this man has gone on TV and told me to my face, ‘Go see this movie, you will enjoy it.’ He’s stealing my money!”

The Onion is known to make the obvious very funny.  But how many people do recognize that what celebrities do when they go on their circuit of television interviews is sales and marketing?  Since they know that most of America looks up to them as our princes and princesses of society, they also know they will be able to convince us to spend the $9 a ticket to see their movie and help keep them rich and in power.

It is sad how few people actually see the celebrity marketing as how The Onion described it as “hoodwink[ing] average citizens”.

How can we become more sensitive to the salesperson/celebrity trying to wrangle money out of our pocketbook?

For more on this article, click here.

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Volunteer or Donate to Help Convince More People To Stay Away From Debt.

Show others how much you’ve beaten debt
for the price of one latte a year. – – Beating Debt Charts

If the recession is over and the recovery is around the corner, volunteers at BDO understand that we will have a more difficult time in convincing people to stay away from debt.

“Dow 10,000 may be largely psychological”, said Lawrence Glazer, managing partner at Mayflower Advisors in Boston

However, that euphoria of good news will trickle down to people’s wallets and help them buy more stuff.  The optimism of the good times can have people take on more debt now, thinking that they will be able to pay it off with their newly inflated 401K later.  But does that make long term financial sense?

Does a bigger 401K create a sense of frivolity to your spending decisions?

As the Dow achieves milestones, does that give you the feeling to be less frugal?

Do events like these create ideas of taking out more personal debt for “nice” things during this “nice” time?

The BDO volunteers will continue the hard work in trying to convince people to stay away from debt, even in the “good times”.  Because remember, the “bad times” will come again eventually and how will you be prepared for those times, if you go into debt during the “good times”?

For more on this article, click here.

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Volunteer or Donate to Help Convince More People To Stay Away From Debt.

Show others how much you’ve beaten debt
for the price of one latte a year. – – Beating Debt Charts

In some continued good news, the Federal Reserve released its latest findings of revolving consumer credit, better known as credit card debt.  Credit card debt was down for the month of Aug by 13.1 percent.  Overall, consumer credit was down 5.8 percent for August.   That is great news because it means that we are more willing to pay off consumer credit and earn our freedom than struggle under the painful agony of debt.

These numbers should help the Consumer Debt Clock to continue to go down.  How much more can we, as a nation, continue to drive the clock down?

For more info on the Federal Reserve’s numbers, click here.

To add the Consumer Debt Clock to your blog/website, click here.

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Volunteer or Donate to Help Convince More People To Stay Away From Debt.

Show others how much you’ve beaten debt
for the price of one latte a year. – – Beating Debt Charts

A video on how the Feds will base your loan payment on your income and how they will forgive your federal student loan debt.

Learn more about the dangers of student debt here.

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Volunteer or Donate to Help Convince More People To Stay Away From Debt.

Show others how much you’ve beaten debt
for the price of one latte a year. – – Beating Debt Charts

DebtFreeChristmas.org

Let us rise up and be an alternate voice to the corporations marketing to us to buy, buy, buy this Christmas season.

We are moving the Beating Debt Alliance page to its own server at http://alliance.beatingdebt.org/.

Before the page was primarily used as a link exchange.  But we want to go beyond a link exchange and make the Alliance more useful for you.  So, we are dedicating its own server to this project to allow all those dedicated to beating debt to help others on the journey.

What is a Beating Debt Alliance?

The Beating Debt Alliance is a group sponsored by BeatingDebt.org that invites bloggers to share their stories as they journey to beat debt and help give personal knowledge and advice to others about how they are beating debt.

Why an Alliance?

Beating debt is very difficult because all for-profit companies are very persuasive in convincing families to part with their money, no matter the cost it incurs to the family. This is a revolution because we are trying to overthrow convincing marketing tactics. We will not be bound to our credit cards and loans. Instead, we choose to live a life free from debt and are working together to succeed.

How can my blog/website join?

There are some rules to the alliance.

• The blog must place the following badge somewhere on their website.

• The blog post must support a certain set of principles.  The system will automatically pull your RSS feeds and put them into draft.  A moderator will read each blog to ensure it is anti-consumerism, anti-debt, pro-sustainability, and pro-Christian.  If it meets those principles, it will published.

• The blog post must not support or oppose any current legislation.  Due to our 501(c)3 status, we are not allowed to comment on any current legislation, so we cannot have any partisan posts on any material we support.

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Click here to join the Alliance.

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Volunteer or Donate to Help Convince More People To Stay Away From Debt.

Show others how much you’ve beaten debt
for the price of one latte a year. – – Beating Debt Charts

by Dan Graves

For every person who longs for spiritual riches, there are thousands who covet material wealth.

Not surprisingly, the lust for riches has often found its way into literature. Motifs of inheritance and treasure trove make a frequent appearance in the stories of all nations. Several famous Victorians wrote novels with such themes, not least among them Dickens, Stevenson, and Haggard. The Christian writer George MacDonald also penned such a novel.

MacDonald biographer, Joseph Johnson, says of Castle Warlock, “It is the beautiful story of how loss and poverty can bring heavenly riches and lasting blessing.”

There is a good deal of truth in that characterization. However, early in the novel, clues telegraph the reader that there is a hidden treasure somewhere in the castle. One of the plot lines propelling readers through the book is the expectation that this treasure will be found. To MacDonald’s credit, his Castle Warlock cautions often against the love of riches. Early on he warns that it is not just the rich who make Mammon their god, but also the poor. Later, he has the protagonist declare that there are “heaps of idols” among those who call themselves Christians, and those who gather silver are the worshipers of as ugly a god as the Philistines with their fish-tailed deity. There are other such warnings.

Indeed, MacDonald arranged his plot so that only after Cosmo, the young heir of Glenwarlock, yielded his cherished family castle to the Lord, willing to lose it if such was God’s will—only then did he stumble upon the means to save it.

As beautiful as the story is, with its portrait of the affectionate relationship between Cosmo and his godly father, and Cosmo’s submission to God’s will, I find it at odds with itself. All the while that MacDonald has his readers rooting for Cosmo to uncover the treasure, he is simultaneously cautioning against the desire for wealth with warnings such as this: “I know not how the born-rich, still less those who have given themselves with success to the making of money, can learn that God is the all in all of men, for this world’s needs as well as for the eternal needs.”

The point MacDonald is driving at in Castle Warlock is that God himself is the inheritance we should seek. Even if the novel doesn’t quite work, there are worse lessons we could learn.

Bibliography:

“George MacDonald.” Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. Accessed August, 2009.

Johnson, Joseph. George MacDonald; a biographical and critical appreciation. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1906. (Source of the image)

MacDonald, George. Warlock of Glenwarlock (also issued under the title Castle Warlock and modernized as The Laird’s Inheritance.) ca. 1880.

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Volunteer or Donate to Help Convince More People To Stay Away From Debt.

Show others how much you’ve beaten debt
for the price of one latte a year. – – Beating Debt Charts

On Monday, Bob Brooks of the Prudent Money Show on KDKR 91.3 FM interviewed Eric about what he is doing for BeatingDebt.org.

Below are some clips from that radio interview.

To hear the full audio interview and radio show, please click here.

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Volunteer or Donate to Help Convince More People To Stay Away From Debt.

Show others how much you’ve beaten debt
for the price of one latte a year. – – Beating Debt Charts