Hi, my name is Allison Baggerly and I'm the founder of Inspired Budget.
I'm a mom of two boys and my husband and I paid off over $111,000
worth of debt on two teacher's salaries while growing our family.
I have now made it my mission in life to help real moms so that way they
can reach their best financial life.
When I graduated from college, I had a very unhealthy relationship with money.
The idea of budgeting stressed me out and it just made me feel like I was poor. By
the time my husband and I were married
we were living on two teacher's salaries.
We didn't have really any money in savings.
So when we
got pregnant
a lot of fear just set in because I realized that we didn't have enough
money left over to be able to pay for daycare for when our son was born.
We had over $111,000 worth of debt, and that was mostly student loans,
and so our minimum monthly payments alone was over $1,400 a month.
I just felt a lot of guilt, a lot of shame,
and it took getting past that and accepting that I
needed to make some changes.
Our ultimate goal was to become debt free.
So our first step was to actually sit down and list out all of our expenses to
actually set boundaries for ourselves.
So the first time we created a budget, it was completely not realistic.
We just cut out everything and then it caused me to just go crazy and overspend.
It took about three to four months for us to be able to write a
budget that fit our unique needs.
I would hang the budget on my fridge.
I hung our debt payoff calculator in our master closet.
And I also took time every single day for about 10 minutes
to check in on my finances.
And if I was off track, instead of saying, "I'll start over next month",
I wrote a budget at that moment
to last us until payday.
Once we were debt free, I honestly thought that
I would never talk about budgeting again, but what happened was I continued
to talk about it. Until one day,
my cousin basically told me, "Allison, it's time for you to take it to
people who really need to hear it."
So I started Inspired Budget to help women who felt stuck like I
did, and didn't know where to go.
I teach women how to budget,
how to save money, and how to pay off debt
so that way they can live their best financial life.
So once I actually started the business, I had a goal to be out of the classroom
within five years, and I was able to leave my full time teaching job
within two years. Starting Inspired Budget has allowed me to take the
dreams that seem silly, and it allowed me to see them as reality.
We have goals to pay off our house early.
We want to put our kids through college.
We just recently
bought a car in cash, which is something that I really just
never thought was possible.
I have a lot more balance in my life.
My kids see me work hard in the home and I want them to know that it's okay
for them to go out and start a business
whenever everyone tells you that it's not possible.
When you surround yourself with people that are going to motivate
you, it makes you want to keep going.
And so, I would say, be on the same page with your spouse, with your
partner. My husband and I have weekly business meetings where we
check in about our budget. Have a plan for the future in terms of
those big expenses, such as daycare.
Now that one of my children is out of daycare,
we took the amount we were paying in daycare for him, and
we sent it straight to savings.
So as your income level grows, take that extra money and put it toward
debt or put it toward savings.
One thing, definitely, that the world has taught me is that there's
always going to be surprises and you always need a safety net.
However, it's important to remember that you can pay off debt
and save money at the same time. It might take you an extra month
or two to become debt free.
However, having that peace of mind is so worth it.
Using the debt snowball method is a really great way to pay off your debt whenever
you need extra motivation along the way.
Essentially, what you're doing is you are
taking your debts and you're ordering them from smallest to largest,
and you're just paying them off in order, regardless of their interest rates.
And it helps you see that you can make traction. That this is
doable. In terms of our happiness,
I would say that, before, I had so much fear and stress about money.
And so once we learned how to budget, we were able to communicate
better and it really allowed us to just live a life that we
never thought was possible.
And that is a life where there is not stress surrounding money.
And that's what budgeting has given our family.