Why it matters · 17 Oct 2026 · 8 min read

We Were 30 With 30,000 € of High-Interest Debt. This Blog Is What We Wish We'd Read.

At thirty, we owed about 30,000 euros.

Not a mortgage. A bit of everything: credit cards, consumer loans, a car loan. Interest rates between 12% and 20%. The kind of debt where the interest takes its slice of every paycheck before you've bought a single thing.

Five years later the debt was gone, and more than 20,000 euros was sitting in investments.

No lottery. No crypto miracle. No secret. What changed things was our first child. Holding a newborn makes you think a lot further ahead than the next payday, and the plan we were on wasn't a plan at all.

This blog exists because almost nobody teaches this, and the people selling to you are very, very good at their jobs.

What 12–20% interest actually costs

On 30,000 €, 12% interest is 3,600 € a year. At 20% it's 6,000 € a year. That's 300 to 500 euros every month before a single euro of the loan itself is paid back. (Example: simple yearly interest on the full balance, to show the scale.)

Now compare that with investing. Since 1900, world stock markets have returned roughly 5% a year after inflation.¹ Good, but nowhere near 12–20%. Paying off a 15% loan is like earning a guaranteed 15%, and no honest investment promises that.

That's the first lesson, and honestly the whole blog in one sentence: whatever runs automatically runs your life. The interest was a system someone else designed. The way out was building our own.

What we actually did

1. We looked at everything. First a budget: every income, every expense and every debt on one page. Uncomfortable for about an hour, a relief for years.

2. We followed one clear plan. Dave Ramsey's The Total Money Makeover gave us a simple order of steps, including the "debt snowball": pay the minimum on everything, put every spare euro on the smallest debt, and when it's gone, roll its payment into the next one.²

3. We cut to the bone, for a while. At the start, a bare-minimum budget. The car was sold. Every euro we didn't truly need went to the smallest debt.

4. We asked our own bank to consolidate. In the end the bank combined what was left into one loan at a lower interest rate. Fewer bills, less interest, one date to remember.

5. We invested a little, on purpose. Even while paying off debt, a few tens of euros a month went into investments. Mathematically that money would have done more on the debt. We know. But it built momentum: every month something concrete grew, and life started to feel lighter and brighter. For us that was worth it.

Snowball or avalanche?

We used the snowball: smallest debt first. Research suggests why it works for so many people. In a study of real debt-settlement clients, the people who closed off individual accounts were more likely to eliminate all their debt, whatever the size of those accounts.³ Concentrating payments on one debt at a time also makes people feel more progress and keep going.⁴

The avalanche, highest interest first, is mathematically cheaper: you pay less interest in total. If numbers motivate you, go avalanche. If you need wins to keep going, go snowball. Either one beats having no order at all.

Setbacks will come. Plan for them

When the debt is large and the road is years long, life will throw curveballs: a surprise tax bill, a loved one suddenly falling ill. Build that into the plan from day one. Let the budget bend when it has to, but only for a moment. Then go back to the plan.

It was never about willpower

If you're in debt right now, you might think the problem is you. The research says something kinder.

When money is tight, the brain gets busy. Economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir call it a "bandwidth tax": scarcity takes up mental space and leaves less for planning ahead.^5,6 In one set of experiments, simply thinking about a difficult money problem lowered lower-income participants' scores on reasoning tests by about as much as losing a full night's sleep.⁶

And if nobody ever taught you this, you're in the majority. In a survey of about 150,000 adults in more than 140 countries, only about one in three could answer basic questions about interest, inflation and spreading risk.⁷

So we don't sell willpower here. We build small systems: a bill that pays itself, savings that leave your account before you see them, a 48-hour pause before any big purchase. Once they're set up, they work on your worst days too.

What we'll write about

1. Wise choices in everyday life. Groceries, subscriptions, phones, cars, habits. Small decisions repeated a thousand times are where most money quietly goes.

2. The tricks marketing plays on you. Why a price ending in 9 sells more (in one mail-order experiment, the same dress sold better at $39 than at $34⁸), why "sale" doesn't mean cheap, and why so many products are built to be replaced. Once you see a trick, it stops working.

3. Investing and saving. Fees, index funds, emergency funds, the 4% rule, how compounding really works. Every number shown, every source linked.

4. Why all of this matters. Money isn't the goal. Time, calm and choices are. A buffer turns a broken car from a crisis into an annoyance. In the US, only about 63% of adults say they could cover a surprise $400 expense with cash or its equivalent.⁹ More than a third couldn't.

Already saving? You're further ahead than you think

Not everyone reading this is in debt. If you already put money aside every month, this blog is for you too. Most people never start. You did. Part of our job is showing you the evidence that you're ahead, and the next small system that keeps you there.

How we write

• Every claim comes with sources you can check, listed at the end of the post.
• Example numbers are labelled Example. Real numbers are real.
• We test famous money books against modern evidence and give a clear verdict, just like in our videos. Otto the dog is the judge.
• No fake reviews, no countdown timers, no "only 3 left". When we mention one of our own tools, we say so.

Where to start

If this helped even a little, subscribe on YouTube. Otto keeps count of every new subscriber and he is completely insufferable about it.

One small system at a time.