Welcome and thank you for checking out my page.
This is all so new to me and outside of my comfort zone, but when you find something you are passionate about you should roll with it.
This is a quick intro to how I stumbled into this lovely community and onto our journey to financial freedom.
I have always been decent with money, I think. Granted my husband and I got married in 2009 with nothing in our bank accounts, lived apart, I had more than $10,000 dollars in personal/student loans with no degree to show for it, bought impulsively and lived paycheck to paycheck. Even with this history we have always paid off debt way earlier than scheduled, saved a decent amount of money and typically had a positive net worth. Granted that was before buying a home. Things began to change after I graduated college, I got a great job and my husband was on track to graduate and begin working at his internship company. We had it made and money was no problem. So where was it all?
We bought our first home, our daughter began private school, student loans were being repaid, we bought new and used cars.
We were so oblivious to where the money was going.
Thanks to dump luck about a year after I graduated college we were able pay off both of our student loans in full. YAY!! But, stupidly, after we were debt free we financed two new cars. Geez. So we had over $800 in monthly car payments, private school tuition, and a mortgage. Oddly enough this felt normal trying to make $800 fit into our monthly budget instead of resorting to our old habits of paying more toward principle.
In September 2018 I stepped out of my comfort zone and spoke to someone I knew about her financial jouney that she had been posting about on social media since we graduated nursing school. It was not the first time I had seen her posting of her success with paying off her debt, but it was the moment that I was ready to ask how she was doing it so fast. She gifted me the Dave Ramsey book The Total Money Makeover I read his book in about two days and it opened my eyes to a completely different way of looking at finances. I was motivated and ready to sell everything to get where I thought we should be.
I was a natural saver and loved working the numbers. I learned quickly that crunching numbers and seeing the potential of my income was intoxicating. I was hooked.
It was mid-September and I started tracking where all of our money was going. We were appalled at how much money we were wasting on food and miscellaneous purchases. All of this was put on hold. We also reevaluated our savings and debt. Within two weeks, I had my husband on board and we were pulling money out of our mutual funds to pay off our rediculous car purchases and sitting down to look at our spending habits. We readjusted our monthly spending and began saving 1/3 of our take home pay and using that to pay down our last debt (my new car…smh). We could have sold it but I really loved it and we had a plan to pay it off in under 10 months…so we are sticking with that plan and we are on track to pay it off earlier than expected too. YAY!
As we keep trudging along our journey of paying off debt and saving as much as possible each month to dump toward our debt I found myself getting bored crunching the same numbers and seeing the same results (not that those numbers are not motivating, they are) I wanted to find a new form of motivation. I joined Facebook groups and individuals on Instagram that were paying off their debt and watched their progress. These people and groups were so saturated with stories and information that I found myself lost in it, spending hours reading these posts. Although reading these stories motivated me, I wanted more. I wanted to help people start their journey and help them along the way. This is how I got introduced to financial coaching.
Although we began our journey picking and choosing the principles from Dave Ramsey, I do not believe that his cookie cutter way of doing things is for everyone. I have pulled and read so many financial books from our public library in order to cultivate the best way to help people achieve their goals. People need a plan that works for them where they are in their financial journey (if they have even started). I feel like I can help young people in many different situations realize that financial independence is a reachable goal for anyone.
I teach young people to pay off debt, gain financial freedom, save for fun, emergencies, and retirement simultaneously, and reach financial independence.
-Amanda J.