How South Africans Can Escape Debt

Most people trying to get out of debt are doing the right things in the wrong order. That is why it is not working.

They start a side hustle before they know what they owe. They open a tax-free savings account while a store card runs at over 20%. They read a book about investing while three creditors are calling. Every one of those is a good thing. Not one of them is the next thing.

Escaping debt is a sequence. Skip a step and the whole thing collapses back on you.

I learned this the hard way. In 2023 I earned R10 000 a month and owed R279 000. I tried the clever things first. None of them worked, because I had never done the boring thing.

The boring thing comes first: write it all down.

Not roughly. Not the ones you remember. Every single debt, on one page, with four things next to each: who you owe, what is left, the interest rate, and what you pay each month.

Almost nobody has ever done this. People know approximately what leaves their account, and they have a feeling in their stomach about the rest. That is not the same as knowing.

Here is what happens when you finally do it. The number is bigger than you thought — it almost always is. And you find at least one thing you had forgotten you were paying for.

Nothing changes that night. Same salary, same debts. You go to bed with all of it. But you can finally see it, and a problem you can see clearly is a problem you can start to solve. You cannot beat a thing you will not look at.

Then the order matters.

Once the page is in front of you, the next questions have a correct sequence: what each debt truly costs you, how to stop the bleeding, which one to attack first, and where to find more money to throw at it. Five steps, in order, no skipping.

I call it the Debt Ladder. It is the method that took me from R279 000 across six creditors to my last payment, made on 24 September 2026, and it is the framework I teach.

The full ladder — all five rungs, with the reasoning behind each one — is in The Debt Millionaire, out in November.

But you do not need the book to start. You need one page and one quiet evening.

Start with the page. Everything else waits.