I'd add to your important concepts and tips that beyond being patient with the results of your financial process, you need to be present to your goals and aware of possibilities that may show up.

For example, when I first came to the US, I had a negative net worth, and when I needed to buy a car, I made the mistake of buying a more expensive vehicle than I should have. This required me to take out a $6000 auto loan at 10.4% (!).

Fast forward a few years, and the issuer of one of my credit cards offered a unique deal. Convenience checks that behaved exactly like making a credit card purchase. No fee and no interest if paid off at the end of the billing cycle. What's more, you were allowed to deposit them into your own checking account! The only thing you weren't allowed to do was to use them to pay off your balance.

Hello opportunity!

I immediately wrote a check for the $2200 I still owed on my expensive auto loan. Then, when that came due and I didn't have that money to pay the credit card balance in full, I wrote another convenience check, for $2000 and deposited it into my checking account. Now, I had enough to pay off the credit card balance.

The following month, I repeated the process, this time with an $1800 convenience check into my checking. Rinse and repeat 8 more times and I was out of debt, having paid 0% interest for that last $2200, instead of the auto loan's 10.4%.

It wasn't much longer before that sort of convenience check was pulled from the market, but other opportunities would come. As the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca is quoted to have said: "Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity."