Trade Me Out of Debt Goes International!

I just want to say thank you to everyone reading this crazy adventure. We are getting regular readers from all 50 states as well as: Jordan, India, Canada, Spain, Columbia, Russia, Australia, Malaysia, and the Dominican Republic, as well as may more! Spread the word about Trade Me Out of Debt!

If you are new to the Trade Me Out of Debt website I will catch you up quickly; I'm trading up one yellow mustard seed over a 3 year time frame in order to become debt free. Crazy isn't it?

Read "About the Project" and the past post to get a feel for what's going on. 

Don't get too excited about trying to get the seed! It will be officially traded this evening. 

Follow the "Track My Trades" page to see what I've traded up to so far! 

Thanks for reading!

Mission: Accomplished

Remember the Isuzu Rodeo I spoke of? 

It's now in my driveway!! (well was... It went byebye)

All it took was my little sisters' totaled Oldsmobile, my bicycle and the Wii (I don't think the wife was very happy about me trading the Wii) In less than a week, I went from a police/fire scanner radio, to a freaking awesome 4x4 that we affectionately call "The Silver Bullet" Why you might ask? Because there are 2 bullet holes in the side of it! For real, we found a 9 mil. bullet inside the door!

I didn't ask questions, I just said thank you and proceeded home with no tag hoping that I would not get pulled over by the popo and having to explain why there were bullet holes in my car and that I did not have a tag or insurance.

 The story behind the car went like this 

This dude that was moving from North Carolina to attend college at TU had been driving all day and it was getting late so he decided to stop at a hole in the wall motel in Birmingham Alabama. As usual, places like this have some pretty shady people walking around.

Well, one of them approached the kid, some words were exchanged and next thing you know a couple of rounds were popped off. The kid took off, driving the rest of the way to TU that night.

Okay, I made all that up

 I had a moment of creativity and ran with it. The real story was, the young chap was coming from NC, and when he got to TU, somehow his battery had come loose and was resting against the engine and caught the thing on fire!

I'm not sure where the bullets came into play. Either someone was a bad shot or they are good at cleaning blood up. Being a poor college boy, he did not know what to do!   So what did he do? He had some mechanic fix it up. Long story short, the car traveled all the way to Porter, Oklahoma! Wasn't that the town they condemned because the mines were causing the town to cave in? No, wait that was Picher.

It doesn't matter, either place you go you're going to get lost, stopped by the town cop and arrested because your town football team beat theirs last week and they just don't like you. So the old country Porter boy has some mad car skills and totally fixed this 4x4 up! For the most part at least. I traded the kid the goods and went on my way. It runs great, looks great and beats driving my Saturn which I am 4 times too big to be driving. My little sister said I looked like Mr. Incredible driving the family car. It has some minor stuff to fix.

I actually ended up giving it to a friend because he needed a car. He did a little work on my van and then we called it all good in the hood.

I wish it all ended that easy

For some reason I keep trying to fix things

 I don't know how to fix

Can you see the left side of the window?

It's pretty rough. My finger went right down the side of that.

I wonder if it's because I wasn't wearing gloves?

Or that I did't have anywhere close to the right tools?

Diving Into The Unknown

 I know there are programs out there to help you get  in control and get out of debt but... 

 I want to try something different. I want to trade items, starting with something small, and working my way up to something big enough that I could sell to pay off our debt at the end of this project. I guess you could call this some what of a bigger better game?

My goal: I want to see if it is possible to get rid of all our debt, which is around $95,000 or so in roughly 3 years through consecutively trading up items. This includes our credit card debt and stupid financing mistakes, school loans, and our house.

It seems crazy but anything is possible if you set your mind to it. As a family, we are getting our life back in order and regularly working on a plan to eliminate our debt for good. Life just happened (cars broke down, people got sick, death, unexpected, jobs lost, etc..). I can't count the number of times that we had a large savings built up of at least 3 months living expenses or more and then without warning we would get hit with something that wiped our whole savings out! Then, back to back to back, additional things would happen digging us deeper in a whole.

I know others have tried the so called "Craigslist trading up game," but this is different...


This applies to everyone of us. There are not many people these days that are blessed to be debt free. Some out there were born into very wealthy families, others to not so wealthy. Some out there had everything stripped away from them and at one point had the so called "perfect life".

 Life is dealt differently to each person. Some go along never having anything happen to them and then there are those others...Where it seems to never stop raining. This is my story...I was born into a very wealthy family, and through a series of events, everything we ever had was stripped away. I know there are others out there have tried these "trading up" projects, but mine is different. Mine is unique, and I feel many others out there can relate.


Thanks for checking out my project and I hope that you enjoy the journey with me. 


Who knows where this project will take us, or the type of people we will meet. I am excited to dive into the unknown and experience an unique project, that from my knowledge has never been done like this before. However you happened across this site, I would love to have you as one of my followers.