My wife and I paid off $80,000 in debt, here’s how we found money in our budget to make it happen

A few years ago, my wife and finally started getting serious about our finances. We wanted to start a family and save at least a 20% down payment on a home. We came to the conclusion that the best way to accomplish those goals was to eliminate our debt of $80,000. We had two student loans, two car payments, and some credit card debt from a move from Maryland to Florida.

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We used the debt snowball strategy of starting with our smallest debt and working up to the larger ones. This helped us to feel like we were making progress by crossing things off the list and kept us motivated for the larger/tougher items.

One of the most helpful tools for us was, of course, the budget. Along the way, we found a few areas to make some room and put extra towards the debt. Here are a few tips we learned.

1. Track every penny — I’ve read that it can take 3 months to create a budget that totally works. We had tried some basic budgeting in the past, but got discouraged when our detailed plan unraveled. Instead of starting with the plan, we started by tracking spending for a few weeks/months. Then, when we created a budget, we had detailed information on our habits and saw areas where we could improve. To this day, we still create a budget (plan for the month) and track spending in a separate tab on our spreadsheet. This allows us to compare day by day our plan and see how much wiggle room we have for purchases.
2. Question every bill — On our journey, we saw our cell phone bill, car insurance, and internet bill start to climb. If you feel like you’re paying too much for something, you probably are! Shop around. We were paying $150/mo for 2 lines of unlimited data with Sprint. At the time, they were running a promo for new customers to get 2 lines of unlimited for $100. We called and asked and were able to get that deal. Our ISP always gives an introductory rate for the first year and then raises the price. We call every year to negotiate and sometimes even make it to the cancelation department before our bill gets lowered. It’s a pain, but for us it was worth it.
3. Cancel those subscriptions — We have never had cable, but subscribe to a few streaming services. What we found was that we would be binge watching a show on one and ignoring the others. Now, we’ll turn them off and on when we want them. Throughout the year, we may cancel and subscribe to Netflix 3–4 times. It’s only a few bucks a month, but every little bit counts!
4. Re-think the grocery budget — We found major savings on groceries by shopping generic and going to Aldi. We can’t say enough good things about Aldi. We never went to the “rice and beans” extreme of our grocery shopping, but very frequently I would eat eggs, oatmeal, and a banana for breakfast — which we can buy for less than $1 per meal at Aldi.
5. Sell Stuff — At first this was annoying, but after a while we started to enjoy it. Selling unused items helped us to declutter and we began justifying fun purchases by using money we made from selling stuff around our house. We made some tough calls in this category. I sold a bike I hadn’t used in a while and we sold our lawn mower since we paid someone to cut our grass. And that ties in with our next tip…
6. Decide what you can and can’t live without — we pay for someone to cut our grass because we were working a lot and couldn’t justify the time on this chore. We also decided before starting our debt free journey that we were going on vacation to Hawaii to celebrate our 30th birthdays. We opted not to cancel the trip, but instead paid for everything before we got on the plane. Perhaps we could’ve finished our debt free journey a couple months earlier, but we wanted to take the trip and decided it was worth it. In the end, it kept us motivated. I think if we eliminated every bit of fun from our lives, we would’ve quit halfway through.

Hopefully some of these tips are helpful if you’re on your journey. I’m so grateful we paid off our debt… especially given the circumstances now.

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