About My Budget Made Simple
My Budget Made Simple is the place for anyone who wants to learn how to create a budget they can live with, get out of debt and make a plan for savings. The tools and courses offered here are meant to help anyone who fits this description, and were created out of my experience as I worked to get out of (a lot of) debt and buy my first home.
About Me
I’m smiling now, but I wasn’t always this happy!
Not long after I graduated college I found myself looking out the window of my 5th floor walk, feeling a bit like Rapunzel: trapped in a tower of solitude. But it wasn’t an evil witch keeping me trapped, it was my debt. I was paying the price for years of filling my cash flow gaps with plastic. The pressure of these bills was getting worse by the month and I was struggling to keep up.
The worst part about it was that I really didn’t know how broke, rich, or whatever there is in between I actually was. My lack of financial education and the lure of free giveaways in exchange for a little square pieces of plastic landed me with tons of credit card debt after college. All I could afford to pay was the minimum on most of the bills that came in, which was pretty much leaving me in the same amount of debit month after month. I felt out of control and helpless, frustrated with the hole I had unwittingly dug myself into. I knew it was bad, and I didn’t know how to get out.
I thought I needed to increase my income, and eventually was lucky enough to land a job that paid a little more, but having some extra cash didn’t solve my problem. As part of this new job I was responsible for managing and tracking millions of dollars in project spending…and I was good at. One day as I sat at my desk and looked at my project budget it hit me: if I can do this for someone else I can do it for me too! And THAT’s when everything started to change.
For the first time I gathered up ALL of my bills, statements, and everything that had to do with my personal finances and started writing things down. I created a tracking tool similar to what I had created at the job, but customized to the items I needed to track for me. I also entered all of my credit card information…balances, interest rates, monthly payments, and really saw that paying the monthly minimums wasn’t doing a damn thing for me! Seeing all of this for the first time, RIGHT in my face, was my wake up call. There were no more surprises, no more excuses for being stuck, and for the first time a sense that I had control over my money.
I still use this tracking tool years later. Keeping track of my bills and spending has helped me pay down my debt, and gave me the ability to save and plan to the point where I was able to buy my first home. The tracking tool, also known as the Personal Finance Tracker, was the beginning of my financial transformation, the tool I used to change my mindset about my money. I want to help other people who are in that same cycle of debt and spending that I was, and that’s why I am sharing it now!