Prompt
Result
No result yet
Click "Generate" to create content for this stage
Actions
Info
Script ID
#356
Channel
—
Assigned To
—
Original Transcript
Get ready with us while we talk about how we paid off $150,000 in debt. So when we got married, we had about $120,000 in student loan debt and about $30,000 in credit card debt. We knew finances are one of the top reasons for divorce. So while we were engaged, we took a financial class. We took Dave Ramsey financial, I forget what it's called financial fees. We wanted to be on the same page with finances and we knew that our spending was a lot of control. So if us didn't really come for money and we weren't really taught on how to manage our money, so we kind of carried that into our marriage. Both had jobs starting at 16, but I feel like every time I got a paycheck, I just would spend it that weekend. We were living paycheck to paycheck and we knew we needed to make more money, but then if we made more money, we'd probably spend more money. So it was more of a less hard time. We were like our habits. And this is the steps we took from the class. So the first step, it's called the baby step one, you save $1,000 for emergency. I would say your tires go out, something you're not expecting, emergency room visit, $1,000 set aside for those kind of things. If we put our $1,000 aside, we moved on to baby step number two. Debt snowball. So you list all your debts from smallest to largest, excluding your mortgage. If you have one. And do that regardless of the interest rate. Because what you want to do is give yourself motivation when you start paying things off to keep going. Once we saw everything we needed to pay off and we had it an easy to reach chart, we knew we needed a budget because we had no idea with how much extra we could put towards that smallest payment. So we were really strict. We didn't go out to eat. We were on a clothing budget. We were on a gas budget. All of our money each month was accounted for. So our budget total zero at the end, every dollar had a name before we even got our paycheck. So that was really helpful because it helped us not overspend. We said no to our friends going out. We truly sacrificed during that time because we knew that it was going to get us in direction we wanted to go. I actually motivated us to find other streams of income because we're like, how do we make more money so we can start attacking this debt? We picked up a side work for he was doing some SEO at the time. And I was selling like paper flowers on Etsy. And I think this was actually around the same time that we started our blog. This was not easy. You know, we had it all on paper and we're like, we knew what we had to do. We knew once our debt was paid off, we would have those monthly payments that were going to debt. Or it's going to now be just money that we could use as disposable income. So it took us about two and a half years of intense focus. We would mark on our chart when we paid off the first one. It was so exciting and it felt like we had this renewed motivation to keep it going. But then when it got to our student loans, we were like, okay, this is a way bigger amount. We really need to keep that intensity. Our income went up, but we still acted like we were all a student. We did not spend like how we saw some of our other friends find the like, oh, we should do that. But we're like, no, we need to stay focused. I have to say receiving that last email from Sally Mae saying that your loan is completely paid off was one of the most like liberating feelings that I've had. Because we are still debt free except for our mortgage, which has allowed us to be able to give our 10% to charities. It laid the foundation to be able to purchase our first home and then our second home. I feel like the habits are still there. So even though we're making way more money than we first started doing this whole debt snowball, our mentality is still, how can we be wise with our money? How can we still have a mindset of our budget? We still have monthly budget meetings go over where everything is going to be spent. Our mindset is shifted to investing and making sure our kids are set up with their savings and also teaching them those money skills that we truly didn't have long we did, but there you go.