#20 How to Pay Off Debt While Still Eating Healthy

How John and Rosemary paid off $66,000 in 32 months while still eating healthy and not sacrificing nutrition to do it. Rosemary and John, cofounders of Flourish Fundamentals are both Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioners. They are helping the FIRE community optimize their health as much as they optimize their finances. You can learn more about them on their website: flourishfundamentals.com and sign up for their 30 day reset program here: https://www.flourishfundamentals.com/flourish-fundamentals-30-day-reset-calling-beta-testers/ Resources mentioned in this episode: The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin (https://amzn.to/2ts9QDf)(affiliate link) Free Meal Planning Sheet (www.budgetsmadeeasy.com/mealplan) Full Transript: Hey, today we are talking to Rosemary and John about how they paid off their debt and how they are optimizing health and nutrition for the fire community. So welcome Rosemary and John, thank you for having us. Thank you, Ashley. Thanks for being here. And just to, before we jump in, can you guys kind of tell me about yourselves and kind of what you guys do? Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, I guess that you could call us the token, uh, nutrition people in the [inaudible] space. Um, we both sort of got into this financial independence step free community after we were getting out of debt and we had this background in nutrition and saw that a lot of the recommendations around reducing expenses involved like just eat rice and beans. And that was a little bit, yeah, no, no. So, um, we realized that there was really a need for people to talk about the importance of your own health and be able to teach people to empower them to be able to take care of their own health so that, um, they come, you know, they're more in a position of power when it comes to their own health and not just fingers crossed. Hope you don't get sick. Yeah, yeah. Just not eating ramen noodles and all right. They definitely, there's a sweet spot where we wish we can talk about more later, where you can keep costs down pretty low without sacrificing health. So for example, before we started getting out of debt, when we examined our grocery budget, we were like anywhere from $1,000 a month to 1500 for two bucks. And then we cut that in half. And then we were able to do that and we thought, you know what, let's try to cut it in half again just to see if we can do it. And we did. Um, and I'd say now we sort of settled between 400 to $500, but it's still may sound like a lot to some people listening, but we can get into more about what that actually means. Yeah, that's really not bad. I mean, for most people that I talk to, and it's true for myself, um, you know, with that was our biggest category was, um, of course it wasn't as healthy as you guys were at, you know, as fast food, convenience foods, things like that. But, and so that is definitely an area where people can improve, um, with managing their money as well as their health. So I'm so glad that, um, you guys are doing that and, you know, giving people other options besides just rice and beans. Yes. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be, you know, crazy expensive. We're not talking whole foods every week. There's other strategies to do it, like buying a whole cow or that sort of thing. So anyway, we'll get there, we'll get pasta, there'll be delicious and that's, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I would not compromise if this was not delicious food. So before we jump into eating healthy and cutting costs on food, why don't we jump into like your debt pay off story? How much did you guys pay off and [inaudible] how fast did you do it? So we started with 66 in debt, um, a mix of credit cards and some family loans. By the way, there was a little bit for me, mass majority, I made much more or much less intelligent choices. Yeah. But we got that paid off in 32 months was that was the total and most of the time we were on just one salary. Right. Wow, that's pretty amazing. So were you guys, um, just tell me how this started. Were you guys on the same page or was it one of your guys's idea and then kinda had to drag the other one in? Yeah, I mean, I think we were, we, the way I was raised with sort of the Dave Ramsey, you know, never like credit cards were a bad word in our family. So I never got into debt and never had a credit card. And John had come from sort of a different position. I was raised to believe that credit cards are an emergency fund and so sure enough I used them as such. Yeah. Yeah. I believe your dad had once said that he was doing Dave Ramsey before Dave Ramsey was doing. Dave Ramsey describes that. Yeah. So my family's always been really frugal. But Dave Ramsey actually sort of part of our story, right? Yeah. That's sort of how it started is um, well we went to go see a financial planner actually before we got married. We knew we were going to get married and so we wanted to discuss just sort of like what should we be doing now financially. And that was I think where we