YourFrugalFriend

As featured on CNBC and MSN Money: http://smart.bio/yourfrugalfriendblog

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Welcome to Your Frugal Friend! An Etsy destination for all things budgeting and goal tracking. I am a CMA (Certified Management Accountant), a wife, and a mother of two young children. I love managing money and goals, and I know I can help you love them too.

I have opened this shop to share my tools that have aided me in paying off $140,000 of debt while raising a family, since 2016. This is the budget I created to start this journey: https://www.etsy.com/listing/805506055

I started my budgeting journey a decade ago when the financial crash hit. I was laid off and had to start from the bottom up at a new company. I was completing my two year degree in business administration from a local community college and was making $9/hr as an entry level accountant at my new company.

At this time I was also on food stamps. I was in survival mode, so I felt like I needed to budget every penny. That is when I created a simple budget for myself and started following it.

I was raised in a lower income family who treated every bonus, tax return, lump sum of cash received, like it was time for a spending spree. The habits I learned from a young age about money were very hard to unlearn. Even as a young accounting professional I was not immune to blowing any raises or bonuses that came my way. I thought I had deserved it.

While I was spending money I did not have, I was working full time and finished my accounting degrees. It took me seven years of working and attending school full time to earn a master's degree in accounting. Since I was a working professional, I had to attend a pricey private school because it was the only university in my area that offered an evening program. I left school in 2014 with $96,000 of student loan debt.

During the period of 2014 to 2018 I put my husband through school and that also came with student loans. The highest amount of debt that we had during this time was $219,000. We have since paid it down to $79,000.

I took the tools I created on my journey and have made them accessible to you, so that you too can be on a debt repayment path with me. Let's budget to financial independence together!