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Whenever I face a problem in my life, I want to solve it. Now. The sooner the better.

When Sarah and I first started to face up to our financial troubles in 2006, I wanted a solution. Now. The sooner the better.

I went to the library and checked out a mountain of books. I buried myself deep into the pages. I went crazy with frugality, counting every single penny. I cleaned out my closet and sold everything I could reasonably sell.

And it wasn’t enough.

It took the majority of a decade to get things straightened out. During that decade, I spent two years essentially working two full time jobs and launched a small business while my wife continued to work full time and we also dug deep into frugality, finding many, many ways to save a buck.

I spent those years – and the years since – looking into virtually every entrepreneurship and debt repayment and frugality idea and system that I could find.

What did I learn?

On Tuesday, I woke up, got the kids ready for school, spread organic fertilizer over our back yard, got in contact with a local Congressional campaign about volunteering for them, spent two hours at the library doing research, wrote three articles, read a few chapters of a challenging book, played with my children for a good hour, made a frittata for supper, walked two miles, spent thirty minutes creating an elaborate bedtime story with my kids, and finally passed out from exhaustion. I was genuinely tired – physically and mentally – at the end of the day.

My Wednesday wasn’t that much different, except with a few different activities involved. I attended a school play. I helped my daughter with her piano practice. I worked on a great plan for a future project.

I often see and hear ads for programs that involve the ideas of “banking on yourself” or “paying yourself first.” They’re pretty prevalent on talk radio and you’ll sometimes see ads for programs like these in the newspaper or in the back of financial magazines.

The claims made in the ads seem extraordinary. Many of them claim to allow you to eventually borrow money from yourself rather than borrowing money from a bank when you need to make a major purchase (like buying a home). Many also claim to provide a road straight to financial independence.

It should be noted that I’m grouping several different systems together into one post. There are a lot of variations on what I’m about to describe. The information below doesn’t describe any one system exactly, but many of these programs follow the same general framework.

Here’s how the system works in general.

Several weeks ago, a reader suggested that I listen to the latest episode of the wonderful Freakonomics podcast. If you have a chance, I highly suggest listening to it – while I don’t always agree with the conclusions, I find most of the topics discussed to be really entertaining and often thought-provoking.

Since then, I’ve been digging backwards through the archives, listening to old episodes of the show. Just the other day, I came across a fascinating one – Episode #140, entitled “How to Think About Money, Choose Your Hometown, and Buy an Electric Toothbrush.”