How one family turned their debt around

Transcription:

When our family decided to be debt-free, the first thing we did was create a zero-based budget, and all that means is every dollar had a name. We listed out our expenses, and then listed our income and then matched all those dollars to our expenses. We had things like, at the time, rent and that was an easy one, but sometimes there were things that we didn't notice that we were spending money on until we started writing it down, things like coffee here and there, and then we started realizing "Oh, we are going out for coffee four times a week, we really don't need to do that because we can make coffee at home." Once we started doing that, we notice all these little holes in our budget that we could plug up and put all that excess money into paying off debt. Once we did that, it really didn't take that much time, but we gave ourselves a really short leash during that time. My husband and I only had $30 a month, per person for extra spending, and we did free things for fun as a family. It was kind of hard, but it was only about a year and then we were completely debt-free, and we could use that money we spent for paying off debt to start building up our savings and now we don't have to deal with it any more because we've got that emergency fund if we ever need it

Video Categories: ALL PARENTS, Financial Planning and Budgeting, Family Budgeting

Tsh Oxenreider, Author & Blogger, explains the process that her family went through to get out of debt in order to become debt free in a little over a year

Transcript

Expert Bio

Tsh Oxenreider

Author & Blogger, SimpleMom.net

Tsh Oxenreider is the full-time blogger behind Simple Mom and the founder and creative director of Simple Living Media, a blog network dedicated to helping people live intentionally (while throwing perfection out the window). She thinks a library card, a Netflix subscription, and a passport are some of the greatest parenting tools in the universe. She’s a wife to Kyle, mama to Tate, Reed, and Finn, and is the author of Organized Simplicity and One Bite at a Time: 52 Bites for Making Life Simpler. She is currently working on her next book. Tsh and her nomadic family currently live in Bend, Oregon, but several dots around the globe have also been called home (her 7-year-old has been on 60 airplanes and counting). Together, they love to travel, read books, go camping, and make homemade pizza for Friday Family Movie Night.

Tsh writes about living simply and intentionally at Simple Mom, which was named one of the Top 100 Mom Blogs of 2012. She was also number 2 in the top 50 Twitter Moms of 2011, was named one of the Top 100 Mom Blogs of 2011, her blog was nominated for Best New Blog of 2008, and has been mentioned on Apartment Therapy, HGTV, Better Homes and Gardens, Food Network, CNBC, CNN, NPR, Parents Magazine, and more. She speaks frequently about blogging, writing, living intentionally, and motherhood in between changing diapers and hitting the 'publish' button. She is also an advocate for Compassion International, serving as one of their bloggers, and is a regular contributor at (in)courage. Tsh also records a podcast with Homefries called The Simple Mom Podcast, which during one week ranked second under NPR’s This American Life in most listened-to podcasts.

Parenting expert on: Parenting Styles, Family Time, Parents with a Purpose, Values

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