If you’re someone who’s tired of living from one paycheck to the next, want to build a solid safety net, curb impulse spending and increase your earning power, then Adam Baker at Man Vs. Debt is someone you should be listening to. He and his wife paid off about $18K in consumer debt, sold all their belongings, and were able to travel the world for over a year (with their 22-month-old daughter!). With a little hard work, they have been able to achieve some incredible things, and because he’s done it, Baker has become a huge authority in the online personal finance world who shares credible advice that will help you eliminate financial stress in your life.

I’ve known Baker since early on after he started his blog in 2009. Since then, he’s quickly amassed a loyal following, joined forces with some of the biggest forces on the social web (Leo Babauta at Zen Habits, J.D. Roth at Get Rich Slowly, and the team at WiseBread). He and I partnered together with a great team to start Untemplater, and finally got the chance to meet in person when he visited Thailand in January on his year-long location-independent world tour! I’ve been looking forward to doing a video interview with him for quite a while now, and this week we were finally able to sit down for a great conversation.

Baker just launched his first ebook guide, Unautomate Your Finances: A Simple, Passionate Approach to Money , which lays out his holistic approach to personal finance. I know from interacting with him on a weekly basis that he’s spent the last several months toiling away on this guide, he’s gotten a tremendous amount of positive feedback, and this is something that is sure to transform people’s relationship with money. Watch our video conversation below to see why you should un-automate your finances, how you can build a more conscious, simple, sustainable financial life, and get the scoop about his world travels since freeing himself from debt prison!

• 0:55 – Baker’s college experience, business background & financial history
• 2:15 – White picket fences & opting out of the template life path
  
• 4:54 – Unconventional approaches to eliminating debt
• 6:45 – Deliberate, effective budgeting
• 8:13 – How to plan for income fluctuations & irregular expenses when you’re a freelancer
• 10:20 – Couchsurfing & backpacking through Australia, New Zealand & Thailand
• 13:38 – Traveling the world with young children
• 16:07 – More about Baker’s new ebook Unautomate Your Finances
• 20:36 – Cultivating a conscious mindset about personal finance & money
• 22:12 – South by Southwest Web Awards & where to find Baker
  

UPDATE: For more from Baker: check out his Sell Your Crap guide to learn how his family got rid of all their belongings before they went traveling around the world, and how you can sell all your stuff on eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon to make some extra cash. Also, if you want to add a guaranteed $12,000 to your online business over the next 12 months, you might want to grab a seat in his course with Corbett Barr, The Hustle Project. Corbett and Baker are both Faculty members at Digital Nomad Academy, regular recurring mentors for our students inside the Academy, so I can speak personally to the high quality of their coaching.

I’ll be honest: I’m someone who hates to sit down with spreadsheets and budget out my finances. I don’t even like to look at my bank statements every month! With student loans, a lot of random business stuff going on, and the fact that I’m a lazy excuse for a human, my finances are a damn mess, but Baker has developed a product that has fundamentally changed the way I think about money, and he and his wife Courtney are proof that you really can get conscious about how you spend, escape the debt “game” that the rest of the world is stuck in, and start to build the lifestyle you want now! Forget dreaming about retirement, if he and his family can eliminate their debt and go globetrotting, you can get control of your finances and do whatever you dream of doing too.

Here is what you get if you purchase a copy of Baker’s Unautomate Your Finances:

• A comprehensive 83-page eBook. In “The Unautomation Theory” section, Baker relates his experience climbing out of the debt hole and the way that has transformed his family’s lives. He goes on to explain how to avoid financial burnout and unlock conscious financial awareness by un-automating. In “The Science of Unautomation” he’ll help you take a hard look at your priorities and figure out how to budget for what you really want in life. Lastly, in the “Applying Unautomation” section, he focuses on application, showing you how to actively manage your finances with a simple 2-page minimalist budgeting system and apply his “Debt Tsunami” tactic to rid yourself of debt.
• A 27-minute video interview with Leo Babauta of ZenHabits.net. Baker interviews Leo on how he applied the principles of simplicity and minimalism to dramatically turn around his financial life.  Powerful insights from a leader in simplicity, blogging, and productivity.
• A 29-minute audio interview with J.D. Roth of GetRichSlowly.org, one of the top personal finance blogs on the web. J.D. joins Baker on a call to discuss his own financial recovery story and what it’s like now that he’s in the “third phase of personal finance“.
• A 2-page, custom-designed PDF version (printable) of the minimalist budgeting system discussed in the main guide.
• A simple Excel template for those who want to take the minimalist budgeting system digital.
• Free Extended Updates! Get on the exclusive email list and over the next 6 months, Baker will be releasing sample case studies, FAQ’s, and exclusive interviews… for free!

At just $17, I honestly thought he was nuts for giving away so much hard work, but it just goes to show how dedicated he is to providing real value and helping those who need financial guidance. This is a truly impressive product that would typically go for at least $39 if you look around at other bloggers online, and it comes with Baker’s “as long as I have a pulse” money-back guarantee. So if you need to learn how to get the best of your personal finances, start an emergency fund, successfully get out of debt, and create a realistic budget that will let you achieve your financial and life goals, then Unautomate Your Finances is definitely something you need to check out.

And do make sure you follow Baker on Twitter, and join the Man Vs. Debt Militia over on his site MVD to learn more about how he turned his financial life around, took his family vagabonding around the globe, and get good solid money tips.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Get Out of Debt and In Control of Your Personal Finances with Adam Baker of Man Vs Debt

1. A while ago I remember you were very keen on going to study at Stanford. Are you still with that goal?

2. What new changes are you planning for Thrilling Heroics?

3. If you’re planning to detach your income from your time (as so brilliantly put by [Steve Pavlina in this podcast]) how do you plan to do it?

I ask these questions out of curiosity and as I too am facing them in my own version of things, I’d like to hear your approach to them. To be more specific, I’ve had a long-running goal of going to film school, I’m currently in the process of making some changes to my blog and I’m interested in the concept of detaching my income from my time.

I thought these great questions deserved a little more in-depth discussion, and they give me a perfect opportunity to recommit to my mission here at ThrillingHeroics.com and share some of the plans for its development in 2008, so I’m happy to answer them here on TH with this post!

Revamping Thrilling Heroics for 2008

New Developments & Directions
Some great news — ThrillingHeroics.com has recently been accepted as one of the first handful of blogs to join the new Brazen Careerist blog network! I’m deeply flattered to be chosen by Penelope Trunk and the guys at Employee Evolution, and I’ll be honored to work alongside some other fantastic Gen-Y career bloggers.

Thrilling Heroics has evolved and changed over time alongside my interests and pursuits, and it will continue to do so, but I remain committed to my central mission: to inspire and empower others to pursue their dreams and goals in the face of adversity. The discussion is concentrated more in the direction of personal and career development now than it was at the birth of this blog in 2006, but the central message is the same, with a new twist: namely, Thrilling Heroics is a career-oriented resource for college students and young professionals, with a strong focus on leadership, personal development, productivity, personal finance, entrepreneurship, and “lifestyle design.” Above all, I am passionate to encourage Generation-Y readers to pursue their dreams with reckless abandon!

TH started out with strong foundations in green business and social entrepreneurship. But whatever your interests, what remains central to the purpose of Thrilling Heroics is to empower the members of our generation to “think outside the box” of traditional work and traditional business, and really take advantage of all the things that are at our disposal to achieve our wildest dreams. Yes, that’s right — the ones you had when you were a kid. The world is your oyster! Whether your goals are to save the planet or to be the next CEO of GE! Join with other college students and young leaders who want to excel, make their dreams reality, and change the world. Watch as I experiment with entrepreneurship, living the mobile lifestyle, and practicing personal development and growth. Follow my adventures by subscribing to the blog, and share your own adventures as well!

New Format & Improved Features
For 2008, I will renew my commitment to sharing great content with you here at TH regularly, and the strong focus on career development and personal growth will hopefully manifest itself in several ways over the next few months: you should see a fresh, new, more personal design; articles will be organized into new categories and more useful chunk content; I’ve selected a new motto based on input from dozens of friends and colleagues; and I’ll continue to work hard to bring you great interviews within two new series: “Bright Young Minds” with young professionals who are making a difference, and “Proven Success,” a series where we’ll learn from the successes of established entrepreneurs and leaders. Check in later this week for an exclusive new interview with “Duff” McDuffy from Falling Fruit TV — Conscious Media for People Who Care!

Other features in the works include my definitive guide to networking, an introduction to lifestyle design, and further discussion of leadership, travel, personal finance, and personal growth. I’ll be serving up more consistent updates and sharing new, exciting content as I write from my experiences with personal entrepreneurship, and experiments with remote work, living the mobile lifestyle, and geoarbitrage. This is an adventure, so come along with me for the ride and learn from my successes and failures!

Help Me Create a Community for Young Professionals Who Want to Rock Their Careers!
I’ll be looking for guest writers that are interested to share their own stories. Other young bloggers who want to help encourage college students and Gen-Y workers to reach for their dreams, apply here! And to encourage user participation and build a true community, I’d like to potentially set up community forums to continue the discussion beyond the blog posts! That’s up to you guys too, though, so please help me spread the good word about Thrilling Heroics and tell your friends and colleagues. Get involved in the comments, submit your own ideas, and help me encourage our generation to kick ass and take life by the horns! Remember that my mission is to build your confidence to succeed, and to help you realize the freedom and flexibility to invest your time doing what you are truly passionate about.

Cody’s Entrepreneurial Roadmap

Freelancing & Entrepreneurship
To answer questions 1 and 3 above, let me start with the personal side. In the last three months, I left my traditional office job to pursue my true passion and I have been experimenting with freelancing and entrepreneurship. This is why I’ve been somewhat absent from Thrilling Heroics recently — I’ve been very busy with my freelance web development projects and laying the foundations of a business! I now work solely as a freelance web designer and consultant, building WordPress-powered blogs for professionals and small companies. I enjoy serving all kinds of clients, but work particularly well with other professional consultants who want to build up their personal brand, authors and columnists interested in transitioning to a web 2.0 platform, or speakers and coaches who seek to build an online community of raving fans! Some of my recent projects include Life Beyond Code, Moving From Me to We, HighlyObsessed.com, and TomAlexander.com.

I am in the very beginning stages, but my eventual goal is to incorporate and build my own web design company. In the next few months, you should see a full-fledged new business and website dedicated to my freelance design services, and at some point I may need to build a team from among my network of designers and creative-types — or outsource to other freelancers to help me increase my project capacity. This is not something I plan to do for my entire career, nor is it the only project I plan to have going at any one time, but over the next few years my end goal is to create a business that I own. The advantage of being owner, as opposed to president or CEO of a company, is that you profit from a company without necessarily having to run the business. (Not that there isn’t work to be done — but you hire smarter people to maintain things for you.)

How To Automate Your Income
Now to truly separate my income from my time, I plan to generate products that can bring in recurring income. You create it once, and see the profits from it repeatedly. Zen Habits has a great article on automating your income that discusses turning your service into a product:

Do you currently provide a service? If so, you have to devote many hours each week to provide that service. However, if you can turn that service into a product, such as a book or DVD or web site or CD, you can create it once and sell it over and over. Brainstorm the best way to create a product that gives customers the same information or skills that they would get from you in person.

Leo also goes on to speak about other forms of automated income:

Instead of creating an information product, you could create a real-world product, such as a gadget or nutrition product. Freelance designers can turn your idea into an actual design, and contract manufacturers can turn the design into a product. Other types of automated incomes include real estate, online retail businesses (including an eBay business), affiliate marketing, a blog, and a membership-type website. There are many possibilities. Find ways to turn your strengths into a revenue generator.

On my new web design blog, I hope to provide valuable free content, such as WordPress and business blogging how-to’s and instructional training videos that will attract both web design contracts and point users to products like website templates, podcasts, and eBooks that they can purchase from my site.

How To Get Into a Top University
Finally, I do still plan to apply to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, but not for a while. Once I prove myself with a few more years of career experience, either through the success or failure of my business and other professional pursuits, I feel I’ll be more qualified to work alongside other entrepreneurs and young leaders at one of the world’s best B-schools! I still maintain my strong interest in studying green business and social entrepreneurship at the University’s Center for Social Innovation and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, but of course, coming from a not-quite-so-prestigious state school, it will be quite a challenge. For anyone who wants to apply to a big, competitive university, the keys are to show your dedication to achievement and personal growth, and to convince the program’s admissions officers that you’ll do great things with a degree from their school. Also, it doesn’t hurt to build relationships with faculty or with members of the alumni network from the school you hope to attend! Here are more valuable tips from Penelope Trunk.

I’ll be sure to post more about my personal goals and my 2008 resolutions very soon, so stay tuned for that before the New Year if you’d like to learn more.

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I will be leaving to travel overseas at the end of the week (spending the holidays in Spain), but read my upcoming interview with Duff McDuffee — Co-Founder of Falling Fruit TV, philosopher, life coach, and yogin — in the next few days! Duff will share some great thoughts on things from conscious business to GTD to Buddhism!

Thanks again to Gautam for the great questions! Gautam Valluri is a friend from the blogosphere, a sharp young filmmaker, writer, and designer in Hyderābād, India. He does some fantastic exclusive interviews at BrokenProjector.com.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: It’s Time for Some Thrilling Heroics: Commit to Pursuing Your Wildest Dreams with Me in 2008!

I left my full-time employment at Sacramento State University almost two months ago, after which I took a short break while my broken hand was healing. I continued to do my freelance web design, and then I also took a temp job with my stepmom’s company in Roseville. I worked just four days a week helping the scientific company rebuild their website. The experience was valuable, and the people were great. But I was still working in a cubicle, taking assignments from someone else without having any creative input. When I stepped back and thought about the bigger picture, this still wasn’t getting me any closer to the lifestyle and the career I truly desire.

So I left that job after only three weeks, even though the pay was great and I was making more in four days than I had in five days per week previously. I decided that if I don’t devote myself–all of my time and energy right now–to doing what I really am passionate about, I may very well never take that big, scary step. Right now, when I’m young and have no car payment, no mortgage, no wife, no kids–that is the time to take a risk and see if I can work for myself or start a company!

I’m tired of being an employee. I know I haven’t done it for very long compared to some of you, and I haven’t “paid my dues.” But, I know that’s not the life I want. I want to be in control of my own time. I want to be in charge of my own personal and professional development. I want to decide what tasks inspire me enough to take on. I just had to realize that I have skills that other professionals are ready to pay me for! In some areas, I have a lot of knowledge that can benefit others. So I started designing small webpages for professionals and small businesses. Creating blogs as public relations tools for small companies, and doing technical consulting on the software and programming used to create and run them (I work with the WordPress open-source content management system, so if you or any of your friends need technical assistance, consulting, or web design, please get in touch!).

So I’ve been working on my freelance web design and business blog consulting full-time for a week and a half now. It’s a brand new experience that I’ve just started, and I realize that it will take some time to adjust to (and it will take some time to be lucrative). Other reasons that I decided to quit “work” and eliminate a few other things from my plate right now include focus on healing my fractured hand, keeping a schedule that agrees more with my own circadian rhythm, and practicing a healthier lifestyle…so I am perfectly happy to take it slow and accomplish one goal at a time. But in the first week I have already experienced a few of the challenges that await me: we become so trained in school and the traditional workplace to accept tasks from someone above us–staying motivated and determining the priority of tasks is a new experience to get used to; and the workplace does provide one thing even I can’t live without–interaction with other people! Adjusting to the frequent social isolation of working for yourself/by yourself is tough too.

Regardless, I chose to make the change. At least for now. I enjoy the work that I do–I am able to keep learning and growing, I get to be more flexible with my time, and I get to work with new, diverse groups of people from time to time. I’m self-employed, and my long-term goal is to set up the infrastructure of a full-fledged, legitimate business. Start my own design and consulting firm! It’s a lot of work–defining specifically what products and services I offer and what I don’t, conveying that concretely for the non-technical client, refining the business process, setting up the DBA and tax paperwork, and possibly writing a business plan and trying for a small business loan. Maybe I will fail…but either way I will learn a LOT along the way.

I’ve also studied a lot about automating my income, lifestyle design, and geo-arbitrage. Tim Ferriss talks at length about these exciting concepts in his book The 4-Hour Workweek. And I recently came across an older yet fantastic podcast from Steve Pavlina in which he discusses moving away from trading your time for money. Eventually, I would like to shift my paradigm from thinking of myself as merely self-employed to being a business owner. As Pavlina discusses, the idea is to detach your time from your income, put your income on autopilot, through generating information products for instance, that can earn you residual income, even while you sleep. Or I could develop my web sites further, and try to monetize them. He says how his multiple streams of passive income allow him to spend the bulk of his time doing what he is passionate about, regardless of whether or not it is profitable. Eventually, I would love to develop this business structure, so that my work is less of a means to pay the bills, and more a way to express my passions and continue to learn and grow.

Keep me in your thoughts. Your motivational words (and small contributions to my startup fund!) mean a lot. =)

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Experimenting with Career Options