March 26, 2025
Debt-Less Living:
Your Journey to Gaining Control of Your Finances
Melissa Dederer
Aviva Publishing (2025)
ISBN: 978-1-63618-365-7 (softcover)
978-1-63618-366-4 (ebook)
New Book Teaches a Simple Money Management Process to Reduce Debt
Melissa Dederer’s new book Debt-Less Living: Your Journey to Gaining Control of Your Finances offers simple, practical ways to reduce your debt and understand your current financial picture as well as how to improve it. While the term debt-free is often used today, as Melissa astutely remarks, it’s not possible for anyone to be debt-free. “Even if we could pay off all of our credit cards and loans,” she says, “we still would owe something to someone. There is always rent or a mortgage, water, gas, or electric bills, local, state, and federal taxes, and other essentials. We can never truly be Debt-Free. We can, however, be Debt-Less.”
Melissa then takes the reader on her personal journey to becoming debt-less. Step-by-step, she walks us through her methods so we can learn to apply them to our own lives. If you think managing your money is difficult or impossible, think again. Melissa learned how to do it on her own, even though no one ever taught her about money management. Nor did she need complex methods or fancy technology. She began in the 1970s as a stay-at-home mom by saving five dollars a week in an envelope that she kept under her mattress to build up a nest egg for her family.
Debt-Less Living is divided into eleven Parts. Each Part includes a few Steps for the reader to take to learn how to gain control over that aspect of money management. The Parts walk the reader through such topics as understanding how much debt you have, understanding your income, organizing your debts so you can focus on paying them down, balancing your bills so you don’t run out of money each month, tracking your purchases, and learning how to add money to your balance when paying a bill to give yourself a bonus.
Besides the main discussion, Melissa includes a glossary of financial terms. The last two sections provide information and encouragement to people just starting to manage their finances, such as college students, and a guarantee that it is never too late to start for adults who need to improve their financial situation. As a bonus, the appendix contains blank copies of the different forms like the Financial Register that Melissa uses in her examples so people can use them for their own finances. She also includes QR codes to her website where all the forms can be accessed.
What is most astounding about Debt-Less Living is the simplicity of Melissa’s system and how she explains it step-by-step in a manner anyone can understand. The book is short, which proves the process is not too complicated. Regardless, Melissa encourages people to work at their own pace because whatever effort we make toward understanding our finances will result in beneficial changes. Melissa also reminds us that handling our finances is like going to the gym—you don’t go once and become the model of fitness; to stay in physical shape, you have to exercise regularly. The same is true with your finances. It will take a little work to set up your system and get into the flow of tracking your finances, but once you learn how, you’ll be able to do it the rest of your life so you remain in good financial shape.
One of the best points Melissa makes is that it’s important to create goals and a Wish List. She then explains the difference between wants and needs and how to prioritize what you will spend your money on, saving items on the Wish List for when you have the money, while considering achieving your financial goals to be needs. Of course, she advocates not spending money on things not needed and saving where you can. A simple example is how much she realized she could save by making her coffee at home every day rather than buying it on the way to work.
If you are not tech-savvy, have no fear. A simple bank register or a spreadsheet will be sufficient for you to learn Melissa’s system. No complicated accounting systems required.
I have used many of the same methods Melissa advocates in this book to gain control of my own finances, so I know they work. I also like the brilliance of Melissa’s idea to pay your bills in full but round them up in your register so you have extra money later that you don’t consciously track. That’s a little extra bonus for you.
I can say without reservation that if you use Melissa’s system, you will quickly be on the road to being debt-less and be breathing a sigh of relief about your finances. As Melissa says, “Remember: Debt-less is stress-less!” If Melissa could do it, so can you!
For more information about Melissa Dederer and Debt-Less Living, visit www.DebtLessLiving.com.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and Award-Winning Author of Narrow Lives and The Best Place
