Charissa talks about the 3 things she did to turn her money stress and fear into excitement so she could pay off her debt and put her husband through college debt free!
Grab your freebie at changeyourfinances.com/easy
Resources mentined in this episode:
Paycheck Budget Spreadsheet: www.budgetsmadeeasy.com/spreadsheet
The Millionaire Woman Next Door by Thomas Stanley (affiliate link) https://amzn.to/31SU2XO
Full transcript:
Welcome to the money mindset podcast, where you will find the inspiration and motivation. You need to manage your money better. So you can stress less as living the life you want with budgets and the money mindset podcast. And today we are talking to Charissa from www.changeyourfinances.com. And she's going to tell us all about three ways that she has changed, how she approaches money to get rid of the money stress. She has implemented these three tips to change the fear she had around money in to excitement. Now she gets to be excited about her finances, as well as her story about paying off her debt while putting her husband through college debt free. So let's jump into Karissa's interview. Hi Chris. Thank you so much for being with us today. Hey Ashley. You're welcome. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I am so excited to talk to you about your not only your debt payoff journey and just how that has affected your life, but really about how you have turned that journey and those financial fears into confidence.
And I know you've got some really cool freebies for my audience as well that we'll get to at the end, but before we jump into all of that, can you kind of just give us like a background on your story? Um, I know you paid off some debt and so if you want to just kind of give us a little bit of background about yourself. Sure, absolutely. Uh, I think it all started really at the grocery store and I was right next to the flour and chocolate chips and, you know, I was struggling to keep bacterias, uh, because I had counted out my groceries again, and I realized that overspent and I was just overcome like with, you know, why couldn't I make this work? And I felt like such a failure and all these things like money and budgeting really made me panic. I really didn't know what to do.
So I was newly married and we both brought that into our marriage. I had my car loan and he had a student loan and his credit cards and it wasn't a lot, but the burden fell upon me as the sole provider. And I had a no regular income and I'm putting my husband through school and like, I didn't know what I was doing. And it was just so overwhelming for me, but you know, what if he decides all of this chaos is stress with my money that I had. I had this like dream in my heart to see my husband graduate debt free. Now I really didn't know how we were going to do this because like I said, money was super tight. Uh, the debt that we did have was 20% of my income that year. And I was trying to figure out how to pay off debt and how to manage my money and still pay for school, pay cash for school.
So we didn't take on any more debt. Uh, I had seen my parents pay off their debt when I was in, I don't know, early teens or young teens preteens. And that made such an impact on me that I knew somehow was possible. I just didn't know how I could do it. So I stumbled along, um, best. I could just trying to make things work, trying to manage the money and trying to pay things off and, um, pay for school. And then one day, you know, a couple of years later I looked up, I was trying to match up all my receipts and do my budget and all that I looked at. And I realized if I could come up with a couple hundred dollars extra today, we could be debt free. So I called my husband in, I mean, it was his student loan.
And so I made him, he didn't really know what he was doing, but I made them like click submit the payment because, uh, you know, it was system alone. And as I watched the, that balance dropped to zero, I didn't realize that that day, March 17th, 2010, which is kind of special because it's now March 17, 2020. Um, but that moment was such a defining moment in my life. And that's awesome. Yeah. I taught my 10th dad free anniversary and you know, like that has been such a pivotal point in my life that I celebrated every year. Um, because here's the thing like immediately afterwards, like I watched those numbers dropped to zero and I was expecting some like huge life changing, you know, I dunno something and it wasn't, it was just quiet. And we actually went up to celebrate that night on a gift card.
We went to Coldstone celebrated with some ice cream, but as I headed into the summer with my slow work period, that's normal, slow. You know, I was completely struck by the fact that there's so much peace of mind, even though everything else about our situation hadn't changed. Money was still tight. A work was going to be slow. Um, we were paying for school, all those things. There was peace of mind