Gazelle Intensity

I enjoy sharing personal stories from time to time in order to explain how my personal beliefs were shaped and I love reading similar stories from my fellow bloggers.  Unfortunately, as we do so, we tend to lean toward sharing stories of hardships.  It’s seems to be quite natural for stories we see worthy of sharing to be stories of death, financial hardship, or other difficulties in life.  After all, it is often how you deal with the difficult times that shapes your beliefs. 

As I thought about the topic, I realized I am most likely to reference my upbringing as someone of Mexican descent in a low income family or the death of my son.  I decided I would personally break that trend today by sharing a story that brings me great joy.

As many of you know, I am a huge Dave Ramsey fan.  If you haven’t heard of him or read any of his books, you need to go to his website immediately.  Immerse yourself in the excellent resources on his site and purchase his books.  Find a local church offering Financial Peace University classes or buy Total Money Makeover and get started on your own.  Rich or poor, Dave can and will change your life.  For business owners, buy Entreleadership and find a local viewing of the webinar.  Actually, anyone hoping to get ahead in the workplace should check it out.  Dave bases his family financial and business plans on Christian principles.  Conservatives will appreciate the core principles and emphasis on self responsibility.  Liberals will find themselves unable to deny the effectiveness of the plans despite them going completely against their political beliefs. 

As you get into any Dave Ramsey book or seminar, you will hear Dave reference “gazelle intensity.”  Rather than me telling you what he means by the phrase, let me share a passage from www.daveramsey.com with you.

Dave coined the term after reading Proverbs 6:4–5, which says, “Give no sleep to your eyes, nor slumber to your eyelids. Deliver yourself like a gazelle from the hand of the hunter, and like a bird from the hand of the fowler.” 

In other words, when you’ve gone into debt, when you’ve co-signed on a loan
(the topic of Proverbs 6:4–5), when you’re in over your head with money
problems, you need to work as hard to get out of debt as a gazelle
works to run from a cheetah…

…So what does this weird animal metaphor have to do with your financial situation? If you’re sick and tired of debt and all of the headaches that come with it, then it’s time for you to think like a gazelle…

…So, if you’re still working your way out of debt, are you gazelle intense?
If not, how much longer can you afford to stay burdened by credit
cards, student loans, and car payments? What else could you do with that
money—save, invest, build for your children’s future? 

The cheetah is on your tail. Run like crazy and start getting out of debt now! 

My wife and I started on the Dave Ramsey plan over a year ago.  We shed all of our credit card debt within a couple months and immediately attacked the payments on her car.  For the past 10+ months, we have been following the plan, but lacking intensity.  I had made the decision early on, I would follow the plan, but some parts weren’t for me.  I was having difficulty separating wants from needs.

After thinking with ‘gazelle intensity’ in mind, I finally made the one decision I knew Dave would have wanted me to make from the start.  I sold my truck and shed it’s $429 a month payment with it.  My wife and I purchased a reliable vehicle we could afford.  The exact same day, we made the decision to dedicate every single penny of our tax return to paying off her car. 

If you add it all up, I cut approximately $13,000 of debt out of my life in a single day!

I can’t tell you how excited I am right now and how good I feel about the decision to get ‘gazelle intense.’  I thought driving a new, big truck made me feel good, but today I realized being one huge step closer to financial freedom feels much better.

Watch the Discovery Channel or National Geographic for a few minutes and you will see how innate the concept of personal responsibility is, even in animals.  If a lion’s natural instinct is to care for itself and it’s family, how can a human being not be willing to do the same.  A mother lion will do what it takes to protect her young.  She will spend countless hours hunting, often teaching her young to hunt.  There isn’t anyone else to turn to if she fails.  She doesn’t leave the teaching of life’s lessons to her young up to others.  It is my own responsibility, as Dave would say, to get off my butt, kill something and drag it home.  Apparently animals understand this instinct, but many humans today don’t.  They rely on others and when the help dries up, they are left wondering what happened.

I took a major step in the right direction today.  I don’t want the burden of relying on unemployment if I lose my job.  I don’t want to lose my home because I was too focused on wants.  I refuse to allow the government to have control over my life through enabling programs disguised as charitable handouts.  I will be a real life example of my religious and political beliefs.  I will be debt free, I won’t rely on anyone but myself, and I will show an unexpected level of generosity to those willing to do the same.

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