My uncle had a wish: he wanted to stay healthy. He heard that eating apples is good for you (you know, ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away …’), so he started eating apples.

If one apple is good, he thought, then two must be better. In fact, he started eating apples religiously. He got Vitamin A poisoning. He stopped eating apples.

There is such a thing as ‘too much of a good thing’ 😉

I sent out the tweet in the graphic at the top of this page because too many Twitterers/Bloggers – and their followers – eat too many apples.

Here’s what I mean …

If you’re healthy you get to run and run and run, just like a puppy does. Fun!

If you’re financially-free you get to do pretty much whatever your ‘freedom’ allows, and you no longer need to spend 8 hours a day (or more) at work for The Man. Whoohee!

But, being healthy and being financially-free are ‘wishes’ – something that you want. Just wanting something doesn’t mean that you’ll get it.

So, you eat an apple a day because a doctor told you it’s good for you … or you start paying off debt because a blogger told you that’s it’s good for your financial well-being.

But, the problem with these proscriptions is that there’s no prescription [AJC: yet another bad pun] … you need to be told exactly how much of a good thing is really a good thing, before you keep going and overdose!

You see, eating apples – as my uncle found – and paying down debt – as many blog-readers find out too late – can be good or bad for you, depending on how much you under- or over-do things. Eating apples and paying down debt are just tactics promising to help you get you to where you want to go.

With debt-reduction – as with apples – there’s an optimal point: it’s the point where it contributes most to your real goal.

If your wish is to become financially-free then your goal should be able to be expressed as a specific Number and a specific Date; you should apply debt reduction in such a way that it maximizes your chances of reaching that Number by that Date.

I have a hypothesis that the Number/Date bell-curve for my reader population – nay, the entire personal finance blogosphere’s readership – is well and truly centered where paying down debt only makes:

– absolute sense in the double-digits i.e. where most credit card, personal, and (many) auto loans sit today

– no sense (nonsense?) in the low-to-mid single digits i.e. roughly where home mortgage rates and student loans sit today

And, the remaining debts (say, between 5% and 10%), they can be paid off, if you have low financial aspirations but if you are aiming for $7 million in 7 years, I’m suggesting that these, too, need to be set aside for a while in favor of funding your latest startup and/or active investment.

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