Debt is the enemy of wealth-building

Collins opens with an uncompromising stance: consumer debt, especially high-interest debt, should be eliminated before any serious investing begins, because it's a guaranteed negative return working against you every single day it exists. No investment return reliably beats the interest rate on credit card debt, so paying it off is effectively the highest-return "investment" available to most people.

He extends this skepticism to the broader culture of financing lifestyle purchases — cars, vacations, upgraded homes — treating each debt-funded purchase as a claim against future income that competes directly with the ability to save and invest.

His framing is less moralistic than mathematical: debt isn't bad because spending is bad, it's bad because it locks in a cost that erodes the compounding you're trying to build elsewhere. Takeaway: get to zero consumer debt before optimizing anything else.