When Yours Gluteny was just a tweenager, I was fascinated by music.
I sang in choir, I played several instruments, did some acting, danced, and so on.
It started when I was peobably 8 or 9 and my father bought me an old piano.
I wanted to learn how to play my favorite songs but had no idea where to start.
I had music books but it was beginner stuff.
No one was teaching me how to play Help Me Rhonda, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, or (later on) Smells Like Teen Spirit.
And then it happened.
My father bought me a duel cassette stereo system.
The setup was so saweeet… basically was like my own little music recording studio, complete with a microphone and headset jack.
But… there was no Interwebs or Shazam so it was way more difficult to discover music.
All you had was radio and maybe the local music store.
Sometimes the radio DJs would tell you the playlist coming up but if you missed it then you were out of luck.
Fortunately, blank cassette tapes were cheap and plentiful.
… Which is why I recorded hours and hours of radio music and later edited it onto my own mixed tape.
I accidentally figured out that if you hit “play” first on the recording side and then held/slipped the “record” button and then… slowly metered the “play” and “stop” button on the other side… kind of like working the clutch and gas pedal on a 5-speed… you could create a cool fade in/out effect or “blend” two different songs together, creating an overlap just like they did on the radio.
So I would spend entire afternoons pretending I was a D.J. cuing up songs at a party.
Once I had all the songs I wanted, I would make labels and list the name of the songs I knew. Then, I would go bug people about the songs I didn’t know the name of and when it was done… I had a nicely organized list of songs, complete with the song title and artist.
If I was really ambitious, I’d write down the lyrics too.
I used a lot of those mixed tapes to learn how to play my favorite songs on piano or the guitar.
I’d just play the tape over and over again until I figured out the chords and melody and then write everything down on music sheets.
Anywho, what does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
Well, as I understand it, lots of people are having trouble paying off their student loans.
And… there are a lot of articles and podcasts that tackle this topic which discuss a plethora of harebrained schemes to get out from under said debt.
I once heard it described as “the terminator of debts”… it can’t be killed with bankruptcy.
Here’s my not-secksy method for getting rid of student loans:
Pay. Them. Off.
Lord, it’s a miracle.
If you pay down enough principal, the damn thing goes away.
But do that when you have barely enough money to make ends meet now?
You get creative. Start making your own “mixed tapes”.
If you want help on that front, go book an appointment with me. I’ve helped lots of people rearrange their finances so they could start saving money AND pay down debt without making personal sacrifices.
Sometimes it works out well. Other times not. A lot of it depends on how willing you are to think outside the box.
Speaking of outside the box, if you want more outside-the-box ideas, sign up for my email list, now.