15 Years of Work to Get THIS! ***Still in SHOCK***

um what's the matter you're losing me you're making me tear up i don't know why uh stop this was not supposed to be a crying video i know but when you say that about we can do this you're being weird we can do this well what's up guys this is daniel and dj from arms family homestead and we're sitting out in the merchandise shop our garage our home business whatever you want to call it today's video is going to be a little bit different this is something that uh it's exciting but it's scary to talk about because no one talks about this stuff publicly and there's just something that that i feel like we need to share and we're gonna get it off of our chest as soon as i level out the camera a little bit but you may hear some noises in the background today we've got a little bit of construction going on uh several months ago we had a tree fall on our house and uh it's just been temporarily patched and we're getting a new roof put on the whole house the whole old part of the house but anyways that's what you may hear in the background today's video is our story our journey your go ahead debt free living and financial independence yes it's uh we're gonna get through this my wife and i have taken notes on a awesomely strange round piece of cardboard uh so it's one of those things i've talked about money and income on my channel in bits and pieces for a long time when it was small income it was much easier you know as things grow and build and you know it's uh it's been it's been uh harder to talk about harder to share but in february of 2019 way way way back i did a video i'll leave a link to it in the description box i i greatly encourage you to go watch that video in february of 2019 i sat in the greenhouse and talked about my youtube income and my my financial situation and what i was going to do what my goals were with our income from the internet because i was working full time as a state trooper but my life on the internet was growing my business on the internet was growing and since then it's completely exploded but i had some goals and i set some goals publicly to hold myself accountable and at the time it was we were making about 1500 bucks a month on the internet between youtube and amazon and affiliates and sponsorships and stuff and i was talking about i was going to pay off my truck that year and i was going to tie 10 percent of my online income because i had failed to do that the year before and several different goals and things and it just uh it felt good to get that off my chest and it felt good to share it with the world because i feel like we don't want this video to come across as us bragging and we're not show boating at what we're doing or saying we have a special plan that works for everybody no because but we've worked i feel like very diligently over the course of our entire marriage when it comes to money yes absolutely this is a big deal for us this is huge we've got something that we're we want to show you guys we want to tell you guys about we'll get to it later in the video but uh so that video go back and watch it it we just kind of laid out the framework of what our goals were and we've always been huge followers of dave ramsey we've never gone through the financial independence class but we've watched every video he's posted on the internet for the last four or five years and we took our own take on dave ramsey i'm not going to say we did every baby step by the books but we followed his model as best that we thought fit our lifestyle so if you want to go all the way back to when we first got married when i was a state trooper but just became a state trooper and we were going to have babies and my wife we made a decision that you weren't going to work you were going to be a stay-at-home mom you kind of want to take it from there on what we decided to do with our income and our pay raises and all that stuff yeah i mean which you know we knew it was going to be hard because you know 15 years ago uh 16 whatever he did not make much money we did not have much income it was probably not the best choice financially at the time because we had a house in another town we lived in we had to buy a house there and when we were getting to move back here is when 2008 crash happened when we just listed our house for sale and so that was a nightmare um and so that that it was a struggle i mean we did not have much money we did not go do things we didn't eat out um it was kind of like babe says rice and beans and beans and rice and i mean we were we weren't broke but we did not have extra right anyway um so what we decided to do back then was every year for the first seven years that he was on the patrol they got you know uh an increase in pay and a seven seven year step yeah to get max pay yeah and so what we did with that money that was the difference you know what we normally got and the increase we just pretended like we never got that money and we just put it back in savings so it's kind of like we snowballed our savings and the savings just kept growing and um so that was that was the main thing that we did and we would use that savings yes like when we had a big purchase if we needed a refrigerator if we had a you know a vehicle like a down payment for a vehicle or something or something big we had that built-in savings we were always putting money into yes that was always like a good safety net a good cushion this was way before dave ramsey's before we knew anything about dave ramsey and so we always had that we we lived on less than we made yes and we never we never really dabbled much in credit cards we never had a credit card issue she when i was younger yeah when i didn't know any better that's what i mean like in college you had some credit cards and some credit card debt but we paid that off pretty quickly that was that was a small it wasn't a large amount and we never really got into the credit card issue in trouble my dad was very very very adamant with me growing up that credit cards were the devil and you don't need a credit card and i never had a credit card problem and their debt problem there but anyway so we we never really like had a mountain of debt i did have my school loan debt whenever i went to college they pushed the loans you know i didn't know any better they said take these loans out the school basically talked about taking the max yes yeah so i took the max for my degree and um i never stopped or went back and forth or did any of that but i ended up with about 36 000 you know for a teaching degree which knowing what i know now is ridiculous you know considering what teachers make in oklahoma and and the fact that you were never teacher yeah but i never i didn't like it i should have never gotten that degree to begin with but i just i didn't know any better i didn't really i didn't have anyone kind of helping me you know right anyway so i did we did have the the school loan debt so the school loan debt when we moved back to this house yes this is the house that i grew up in but we had it was a two-bedroom one-bathroom house so we had to do a big add-on to make it a family home and we spent do with that and updating back then we had to buy all new appliances and stuff kind of sort of updated the kitchen we didn't have central heat and air we had to add central heat and air into the whole house which was about 10 grand we had to update the outside of this garage because it was falling down we put metal walls and metal roof on it anyways we had with the add-on and all the the stuff we did to pile everything together to make this our home we had about 120 thousand dollar loan yeah and then several years later her grandma was was uh living in the house that she lived in for 50 years raised her family and everything and was probably 30 miles from us and the family was wanting to get her closer so we went out on a limb and purchased a home in town for her and basically sold her place and used what it sold for as a down payment on that home so she lives in in that house rent free with just the one payment when she sold her house and we made we were making payments on that house as an investment property it seemed like a good investment for us we got it at a good price and we knew we could make money on it eventually so we took out a loan for that house so we had two house payments some student loans and not that we were in debt trouble but we always had one car payment which was either my truck or your vehicle we flip-flopped we did good on vehicles but we would pay them down quickly but we always had at least one loan payment and then february 19 you know that video i told you about is gonna pay off my truck we we snowballed on that truck and paid that off in a year and kept rocking with with the internet and our online income and you know i always talked about side hustles everyone needs side hustles you need something else besides your your nine to five day job i watched a thing or read a thing one time that said your nine to five will make you a living but your five to midnight will make your fortune and i i took that to heart that's so true not that we don't want to come across as this is just money grabbing but so many of us get trapped in that nine to five rat race and you get trapped you get stuck you you get a good job a good career with a good pay and a good salary and time off and benefits and then you go out and buy a house and two cars and a camper and a boat and vacations and all this stuff and and you you're living in a fine line of here's my income say it's 80 000 a year but it cost you 75 000 a year to live there's just not much wiggle room there and that scared us we didn't want to do that we didn't want to be in that position so the side hustle thing you know what early on i was mowing lawns and she was doing photography stuff and we had all kinds of different side hustles and the internet opened up a whole new world for us and then youtube happened and started making videos and started making some income there then we figured out oh man you can do affiliate marketing and make money through amazon and all these other companies and sponsorships and then facebook started paying and all this stuff it became a business and then that was what prompted us to to push the merch thing the arms family homestead and the creek life merch and it's growing this business to to help our family become financially independent then covet hit in 2020 and i know covert was a terrible it still is a terrible awful bad pandemic for our country but for the internet it exploded because everyone was at home and we happened to have a youtube channel that had several hundred videos about self-sufficient living and growing gardens and producing your own food and in 2020 when the pandemic happened like that stuff went through the roof people were looking for ways to i just want to throw this out there um if you don't think god has a plan uh you're wrong yeah because you know sitting here just having this conversation and just like oh my gosh that's so true like he knew that all this was gonna happen you know and we didn't always have no clue years ago like when you weren't even i would say serious when the gardening was just a release for you yeah so anyway i was i had no idea three years before the pandemic that i was making videos that would help people learn how to grow crops or learn how to keep their animals or raise their animals or whatever it was but 2020 happened for us and our youtube channel our facebook page exploded like grew by leaps and bounds which to be quite honest made our income grow by leaps and bounds and we were big savers we were you know i am not a spender we were big savers we did not like to spend our money as a couple some of us struggled but so you know then we started learning how to get into like taxes and all this stuff with with online income but we you know we're growing a business it's it's growing tremendously it's way outperforming my day job as a state trooper and you know we got to a point where we had to say i had to make a commitment are we going to do am i going to keep my job that i've had for 14 years or quit and i walked away from the highway patrol almost one year ago like we're making this video just a couple weeks after my one year anniversary and that was a scary thing for us but i told myself i wasn't gonna walk away from that until i had multiple revenue streams set up in place as backups for that that job income and that's where you know youtube adsense and facebook revenue and the merchandise and affiliates and sponsorships and all these different things that we branch out into are are just our safety net and covid i'm not even supposed to say that on youtube i don't want to get demonetized but the pandemic um allowed so much change for our family last year 2020 we paid off we were able to pay off all of her student loan debt and that house in town that her grandma lives in which is not a big fancy house but still we paid off 60 or thousand dollars in debt ninety thousand dollars in debt last year yeah thanks to so many of the principals we'd watched from dave ramsey yeah and then you know we wanted to we want to move forward we want to we want to figure out what our path in life is but you know i've always wanted to be debt free debt-free get get out of debt and so many people argue back and forth i watch a good friend of mine in pensacola and i referenced him back in 2019 is jack motley you know yak motley on youtube he does a lot of crazy stuff he used to be a lot of fishing and then yesterday he was eating the world's hottest gummy bear but he does a lot of financial stuff and and through his facebook page i've watched him over the years he was really big into audio books and he would always post what audio book he was listening to and when i was working i started downloading like every audio book that i could find on on finances and self-development and self-help and personal growth and financial independence and so many motivational books on on you can do this and it just changed my mindset and i have jack to thank for that because he really got me into those audio books and changed who i am and how i see the world and how i see money and gets me out of that it really got me out of that uh rat race mentality of being stuck i thought not that i disliked my career but i was trapped in a job whether no matter how much you like your job you sometimes you get trapped there and you've got an income and you got bills and your income just barely if you're lucky your income is just barely above all your bills and we weren't living paycheck to paycheck but we were never really getting ahead in life so the internet changed that and jack changed that and audible and all the books and i've got i could give you a list of 100 books that i've listened to and uh it just changed things so coming into 2021 the only debt we had left was our house it's our house our mortgage and i told my wife i want to pay that off and she's like i do too but don't spend all of our savings on it and i was like we got the money let's just pay it off yeah and then i agree it was we couldn't just go dump all of our savings we couldn't do it we can do it we were living on the internet you know and anything can change so fast we wanted a safety net so we just kind of had to keep plugging away this year and plugging away this year and this year's been very great god has blessed us tremendously the merchandise thing we started back in november has done tremendous for us you guys have blown us away at how much you've blessed our lives and how much god has has blessed us to be able to do this stuff it's it blows my mind but i called the bank the other day pnc bank the last person on this earth that we owe a debt to and you know i'm not going to quote scripture but the the bible says that the borrower's borrower is slave to the lender and if you don't believe that look up what an indentured servant is and you'll see that you're a slave if you owe someone money you're a slave to them they own you maybe not your whole life but they own a small piece of who you are and uh if you don't believe me quit picking your house payment just don't make your house payment for six or eight months don't take daniel's advice don't do that see where you're living see who's in control of your life uh don't pay your car payment for about three months and see where your car goes the borrower is slave to the lender and so for my uh 37th birthday the other day my wife said what do you want for your birthday i said let's pay our house off and uh that wasn't as easy as i thought it was gonna be it's hard but so we called the pnc bank and was like hey we want to pay our house off and they're like well we can't do that today we'll have to send you a payoff notice it take five to ten business days to get to you and then you're gonna have to go to your bank and get this and this and this and then mail in a payment it'll take another five to ten business days i'm like you don't want my money right now you don't want my money i'll pay you yeah we worked up the courage to call and thought we could do it no yeah so then we have to drag this little process out so in this envelope is a cashier's check for what 80. well i wasn't going to say the amount oh well you know 80 000 oh to pay off our last debt that we owe no one else in the world a penny hang on do you want me to not say that no it's fine it's fine i just wasn't that's not what i was looking for i was out i was looking for hey what's in there our last debt so as of making this video we are debt free you know so we've watched so many people go on dave ramsey and do the the debt free scream i really want to take my wife to nashville because she loves nashville and go to dave ramsey and do a debt-free screen um but we were talking about the other day and she's like but i feel like we cheated yeah part of me feels like i mean not all of me obviously because we've worked very diligently and hard for many years long before youtube i mean i use coupons a lot a lot a lot um i'm still very frugal even with the money we make now i'm like she buys used mattresses what we've gone to people's house and bought mattresses not the newest one we have now but in the past we've gone to places and bought people's used mattresses you know just random gross people don't junctions out no but i'm very frugal yes i get made fun of by my friends all the time but um i mean we still take our used clothes or we donate them or i take them to a consignment store i mean we still buy clothes at consignment stores yes yeah like not all of them but we still shop at the consignment store yeah so um but it's still like i don't know you know i understand a lot of people don't work in a place that you know can make the money that that we make right now um on the internet so you know it kind of is kind of weird but either way um the weird feeling now that i'm getting is oh like we don't have a payment i don't know it's just super like surreal in a way because yeah we're not even 40 and we just paid off our mortgage and um and we have no debt and so it's a little weird like there is a little bit of guilt yeah honestly there really is because we still feel like we should be in the same rat race that that we used to be in that we feel like most americans are in but we're we don't want to make this video to show boat we want to make this video to challenge each and every one of you that has that owes anyone in the world any money at all like no matter how big or how small yeah like you just got to start somewhere you can do it you can do it you can be debt-free and and then once you get that free that's where i feel like we went from like negative to zero like we've made it to to like ground zero and that's not our end goal like to me like we've made it but we still we still have bills we still have things we have to pay for and we still have expenses so in a sense we still have to work it's an unconventional job it's on the internet it's not a normal nine-to-five job like most people have but we still have to work and we still have to make money so our next you know going forward our goal i feel like is financial independence to where our investments make enough money that we don't even have to work unless we choose to but this job this what we do on the internet is so much fun and we're truly blessed and i know god has played a huge hand in it and we wouldn't be where we are without without all of you and and and our in god i mean it's crazy i never dreamed we'd be in this position i never dreamly be sitting here making this video that's much harder to make and much harder to put out there to the world than what you would expect sweating like you know it's there's a lot of things in it you know part of it i feel like it's it's judgment we don't want we don't want no we don't want our friends and family and people around us and people in our area to feel like we think we're better than anyone because we're not no we just worked our tails off and got extremely lucky in a business that was successful at the right time in our lives i said we worked our butts off well i know but then you said lucky and i don't like that word well because we're i don't i don't believe that i looked on the social blade today on socialblade.com and it shows all your statistics on youtube we had 999 videos so it took us this will be like 1 000. this took us our 1 000th video how crazy is that 1 000 videos on the internet and probably 5 years of nose to the ground hard work on the internet plus you know years before that but you know when i was working a full-time job i'd shoot videos and during the day go to work in the evening and edit from 11 to 2 a.m and then be back up with the kids the next morning i mean we work it's not just luck don't think it's just luck i'm not saying that yeah no and during all that time you know i was still with the kids and working myself yeah pursuing the photography stuff yeah and that was you know a lot of times he would get home from work in the evenings and i would leave so he's trying to make a video trying to do stuff work with homework and you know which was fine i was fine with that you know but uh you know so it there were there was a lot of work a lot there and there still will be yeah so we haven't we've reached one finish line but we're not done we're still gonna go we're still we're still here to help you guys to encourage you guys and uh we're not experts by any means don't think we've got degrees in all this stuff we've just got school of hard knocks and youtube has taught us so much and audible and friends and family and we've learned just so much but anyways our last debt is paid i'm looking at our notes because back to our pizza box looking thing here uh financial freedom is achieved we're going to start working towards financial independence yes in our own way but you have a song that you want to share yeah so my song uh is by dirks bentley it's called living uh it's one of my favorites i just love it um basically are are you are you living or are you just here you know are you going out and enjoying your life like actively purposefully enjoying your life are you living are you talking to your friends and family and having building relationships and are you just sitting back like a passenger you know um are you living life or is just life living you yeah so in the song it says some days um oh my gosh i just lost it uh some days you're just breathing just trying to make a living um don't you don't have to live like that you don't if you make a choice make a plan and stick to it the best you can sometimes we have to deviate and come back but because you know life happens but live just live that's the one thing um you know dave says it's it's like my favorite quote and it's the first time i heard it i was like oh i like that let's do that and uh dave says live like no one else today so that you can live and give like no one else tomorrow and i'm so stinking excited that that's where we're at like it just gives me goosebumps to think about what what we can do and who we can help and it's just i just love that that's kind of what i do anyway because you know that's what moms do um especially for our kids and our family and um what's the matter you're losing me you're making me tear up i don't know why uh stop this was not supposed to be a crying video i know but when you say that about dave and where we're at i can't even we were never in a lot of debt trouble we've never been in a financial problem but i can't explain you guys the the feeling the pressure lifted off of our shoulders and the pressure just walking away from a career that was so such a good career for so many people and taking a chance on the internet and wondering is this really what god wants me to do is this the path i'm supposed to take and the blessings that came so fast from following what we thought was what god wanted us to do is incredible you know i don't mean to cut you off or interrupt you but it's okay when you said that quote by dave i've heard it a million times you know live today live like no weather today so you can live and give like no other tomorrow like i can tell how many times we shared a meal at a restaurant and our friends laughed at us yeah we still do we still do but but seriously like that may have only saved us 10 bucks but it was it was the concept it was the thought it was a mindset and you know i don't want any what i want more than anything else in life is for for everyone to experience that freedom that peace peace it is just this you can you can do it you can do it we did it we're here we're a living example and we're not we're not bragging we're not showboating but it's it's such an emotional thing and i want that for you guys i want it for everyone don't be a slave don't be that don't be a slave to the lender we need to wrap this thing up because i wasn't wanting to make a 30 minute video and i wouldn't want to sit out here and cry but uh we're debt-free yeah how's that feel to say i'm fine hashtag that friend dave ramsey yeah maybe we will make that trip to nashville i think we should i mean so anyways guys i think we're going to wrap it up right here's anything else you want to say go listen to that song it's amazing living by dirks bentley yes yep and try whether you like dave ramsey or not just listen just listen to him yeah it's crazy um we did it we're here we're not done we're not finished we love you we thank you guys so much for for blessing our family and and and letting us take you along on this journey that we call life and uh we're trying to live it to the fullest yep so guys thanks for watching um i hope you enjoyed it i hope it helps you i hope it challenges you and uh hope we didn't come across as we're above anyone or better than anyone because we're not we're just typical everyday normal centers on this earth trying to figure out our way yep so we'll see you on the next video bye

Channel: Arms Family Homestead

Views: 147,589

Rating: 4.9349823 out of 5

Keywords: Arms family homestead, farm, farming, homesteading, dave ramsey, dave ramsey baby steps, dave ramsey show, dave ramsey budgeting, dave ramsey millionaire hour, debt free journey, debt free scream dave ramsey, debt free scream, debt free millennials, debt free living, debt free now what, debt free life, debt free dave ramsey, debt free journey 2021

Id: TOnMMRDUm-E

Length: 29min 6sec (1746 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021