cutting expenses

Allison Baggerly and her husband partnered together to pay off $111,000 of debt in 4 ½ years. They completed this difficult feat on two teacher’s salaries with two little kids at home.

We’ll have to completely overhaul our budget to accommodate the realities of my new paycheck

Taking action will make you feel like you have at least a little control, which is a great remedy for anxiety.

Getting ahead financially on such a small income requires what I call a ‘death of a thousand paper cuts’ in regards to finances. Yes, there are a few big things you can cut and feel amazing about. The low hanging fruit, cable and what not. After that? It’s much harder, and it’s a couple bucks here and a tenner there. Here is one way I cut costs over time that continues to this day.

The first thing we had to do, once I added up all the debt, once I had my UGH-Sick-and-Tired Moment, we had to get real with our spending. So, I needed to see where exactly all this money had gone. We don’t live in the lap of luxury. Yeah, we have a flat screen television. The couch behind me? Bought that secondhand. Fancy car in the driveway? Nah, at the time we were driving an ’07 Honda Odyssey minivan. We really didn’t have anything to show for the almost-$60,000 in debt that we in fact had.

Here’s the thing: Teeth can be really, really expensive – really expensive and most dental is not covered by typical health insurance. Some emergency dental might be covered by your regular health insurance, but majority of dental work is something that you are going to have to self-fund or will be partially covered by your health insurance. And what’s even more frustrating is the cost of dental procedures can be totally opaque.

It’s about money but it’s also about time. How quickly can you see a return from either cutting back or increasing your income?

We didn’t see the signs of the coming crisis. No one did. We were just a young family, busy living our lives.

I figured if I’m going to stay doing this kind of low-level job, I’d better try to enhance my wealth, maybe not through W-2 work, but through investing.

I strive towards frugality because it wasn’t that long ago when I was very financially stressed. I learned my lesson the hard way, and although my friends sometimes give me crap for being “stingy,” I don’t ever want to repeat going through that experience again.

The internet has made shopping a whole lot easier. It means I can sit at home in my pajamas and comparison shop a dozen sites in a half an hour while sipping a cup of tea.

That beats the exhaustion that comes from driving around to a bunch of different stores all day to compare prices and pick up stuff all over town.

Money is easy to spend and hard to save. But there are a few things you could do to make it a little bit easier to save money.

We are here to help you continue your debt journey… because it can be a long one!

Looking at the math, he’s absolutely right — my response to spending impulses (hobbies, clothing, electronics…) determines whether I spend my life doggy paddling and gasping for air or become an olympic swimmer.

The mundane choices we make every day reverberate years into the future.

The first $100k is such a pain because most of it is purely based on how much you save. When you have less than $100k, you have very little investment returns helping propel your net worth higher. It’s all about how much money you can throw in your bank account each month.