My Story

As a little girl growing up in the late 1980s, I can remember my dad telling me, make sure you always save your money, you are going to need it later. Every time I would receive a dollar, whether it be from doing chores or finding it in an easter egg, it would go in my piggy bank.

As I got older, I never really understood why I needed to save money. I moved out of my parents’ house when I was 25 years old, living with my first roommate, and I was working as an elementary school teacher basically living paycheck to paycheck. I had friends that budgeted but never really focused on it or understood it.

Fast forward a couple years later, I am 31 years old and had just broken up with an ex-boyfriend and I found myself on my own in an apartment where I was paying over $1300 a month in rent without utilities. I had just left teaching and was trying to decide what in the world I was going to do next.  I went back to school to get my paralegal certificate and began my career working at a law firm with no experience making $10 an hour. I was really struggling. I would consistently charge food and other miscellaneous things to my credit cards, just because it was faster and easier to do. Swipe this, buy this, that was all that I did. Before I knew it, I found myself with my maxed-out credit cards and $20,000 in debt. Something had to be done and it had to be done now… I couldn’t live like this any longer.

I began watching YouTube videos on budgeting and how to create a budget. Many of the strategies and tips that I found didn’t really resonate with me and I knew I had to make them my own and work for me. But honestly, I was clueless and didn’t know where to start. How do I create a budget? What is a budget? 

The whole first year was the absolute hardest and I will never forget it…

I would dread going downstairs to the mailbox each day and seeing what bills were in there. 

Once I received all of my bills, I took them out of the envelope and as I closed my eyes, I laid them out on the table. 

This was a lot harder than I thought and I knew trying to keep up on minimum payments on credit cards over and over each month was not going to get me anywhere. 

I took a piece of notebook paper and began making a list. I remember looking at it with a shocked look going “what in the world did I get myself into?” “How can I fix this?” I was set up for failure and I was letting myself down and I wanted to change.

This was the start of something new and exciting, and I couldn’t wait to get there!

My mission for this blog is to share my experience with you and I want  to help families (with or without children learn) how to budget in a way that is comfortable for them. In my blogs and on this platform, I will share tips and tricks of how to budget and ideas of how to make it your own. Although I am not a financial advisor or expert financial consultant, I want to share my story and my experience to help others that are in the same position I was and looking for a way out.