Jerrold Mundis - How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously*: Based on the Proven Principles and Techniques of Debtors Anonymous

This Isnt About Eating Cat Food and Working Harder.

Its about getting out of debt once and for all. Its about you getting out of debtno matter how long youve been there or how much you owe.

Its Not About Clipping Coupons or Saving String.
Its Not a Get-Rich Scheme or an Investment System.

Its a clear and simple program that will enable you to free yourself from debt and to stay free forever.

Be as skeptical as you want. But if you follow this program, youll still get out of debt. These are not simply theoretical ideas. Theyve been tested and proven over the last two and a half decades by hundreds of thousands of men and women who have already used them to free themselves from debt and thousands more are using them right now to do the same thing. You can too.

This program works. Its that simple.

2012 Bantam Books eBook Edition

Copyright 1988, 2003, 2012 by Jerrold Mundis

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random
House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

B ANTAM B OOKS and the rooster colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a revised edition of a work previously published by Bantam Books,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., in 1988 and 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mundis, Jerrold J.
How to get out of debt, stay out of debt, and live prosperously/Jerrold Mundis.
Bantam rev. trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.
Based on the proven principles and techniques of Debtors Anonymous.
eISBN: 978-0-345-53479-8
1. Finance, Personal. 2. Debt. I. Debtors Anonymous. II. Title.
HG179.M855 2003
332.02402dc21 2002074739

www.bantamdell.com

Cover design: Beverly Leung

v3.1

This is a book about debt and about freeing yourself from debtforever.

You, like me, like every other American, are either:

Overwhelmed by your debts

Sometimes uneasy about them and worried that you might be getting in too deep

Or you have a surplus of money and rarely think about debt or credit at all

Most of us fall into the first or second of these groups. If you do, then this book is for you. It will teach you step by step how to liberate yourself from debt, stay free of it forever, and live a life of prosperity and abundance from then on. Even if issues of debt and credit are largely irrelevant to you, youll still find valuable material here that will help you manage your money more effectively, bring more of it in, and use it in more pleasurable ways.

I first wrote this book in 1986, at the end of my own long spiral downward into debt and into the pain and even despair that inevitably accompany it. The power of the concepts and techniques I presented here for stopping that terrible decline, getting free of debt, and learning how to live prosperously has been proved repeatedly since then by the hundreds of thousands of men and women who have used them to do just that and who are using them to do so today. For many, these concepts and techniques have become a way of life, as they have for me.

The book is even more relevant now, to more people, in this new and third edition than it was back then and again in 2003, the first time I revised and updated it. In the past quarter of a century, personal debt has simply grown larger and more pervasive. In both boom times and lean times. It hasnt mattered whether jobs were plentiful or scarce. It hasnt mattered whether credit was easy or tight. It hasnt mattered whether it was the aftermath of Black Monday in 1987, when the market lost a quarter of its value in a single day; the roaring 1990s that followed, with money washing back and forth across the country in great tidal waves; the Crash of the Dot-coms at the turn of the century or the booming market that surged up after it; or the Recession of 2008 and 2009, which still lingers as I write these words today, in 2011. While some Americans did begin to exercise restraint in the face of the real estate and banking meltdowns, more simply kept going into debt. Personal debt, according to an AP-GfK survey of 2010, has become the single most significant source of pain and stress in the average Americans life.

This new edition of How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously retains all the essential material of the original edition as well as changes I made for the 2003 edition and the chapter I added then called Couples and Families. (If there was anything I would have done differently when I first wrote the book, I decided in later years, it would have been to include counsel specifically for people who were part of a couple or family or raising children alone, to help them practice the rest of the program more easily. So what I did in the first revision was adapt a chapter from one of my later books, Earn What You Deserve: How to Stop Underearning & Start Thriving, where I did address those circumstances, for use in this book.)

Here, in this new edition, I have again reworked parts of the book to reflect changes in society, enhanced other parts, added material about online resources, software, and the Internet, and again updated the numbers because of inflation.

If you are new to How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously, I promise you that youll find the same freedom and joy in it that I and so many others have and continue to find. If you are revisiting the book in this new edition, I promise you that you will find in it renewed enthusiasm for this way of life and powerful reinforcement for living it. Either way, Godspeed.

Its about getting out of debt once and for all. Its about you getting out of debtno matter how long youve been there or how much you owe.

Its not about clipping coupons or saving string. Its not a get-rich scheme or an investment system.

Its Back to the Black, a clear and simple program that will enable you to free yourself from debt, to stay free forever, and to bring prosperity into your life.

Sure. Uh-huh.

Be as skeptical as you want. But if you follow this program, youll still get out of debt. These are not simply theoretical ideas. Theyve been tested and proven over the last two and a half decades by hundreds of thousands of men and women who have already used them to free themselves from debt; many thousands more are using them right now to do the same thing. You can too.

This program works. Its that simple.

Discussion of personal finance, particularly indebtedness, may be the last American taboo. Most of us shrink from it as we would from something obscene. Yet personal debt is and has been for the past several decades epidemic in America: More than thirty-five million Americans are overwhelmed by it at this very moment, many only a paycheck or two ahead of catastrophe, and millions more are living in daily stress and discomfort because of it.