I think when you're in your early twenties
it's just something nobody ever really talks about.
Everyone always talks about
having stuff and getting stuff
but not quite the money they've spent
or how they got the money to get it.
I had payday loans,
credit cards,
store cards,
and I probably owed my best mate £50.
I grew up in a council flat in north London with my mum and my younger brother.
I had two or three jobs from when I was about 16.
My mum got really, really ill and was physically unable to work.
When I got to 19, I was working with a friend
who introduced me to my very first payday loan.
It was £200,
and I think I had to pay back something like £290.
Which at the time didn't seem so bad.
The problem was, when I paid the £290 back
I was £290 down.
So I needed to borrow £300,
and then it just completely spiralled.
The favourite place for everyone to go for drinks after work
was a cheeky Wetherspoons.
I remember having a massive irrational fear of buying a round.
Because if I went out with everybody else
I just would not be able to afford to do it.
I remember the day I got it,
I remember that night we went to Wetherspoons
and the drinks were on me.
I think part of it for me was that
at 16, 17 and 18 I was
working so many jobs,
looking after my mum,
and I had such an overwhelming responsibility to grow up quickly.
So when I had this chance to live,
and to do all these things that my friends did, probably years before me
I just grabbed it.
It took me probably about two or three years
to get into about £18,000 to £20,000 worth of debt,
and it took me five years to pay that back off.
I was 22 when I got pregnant.
And it was the most life-changing thing that happened to me
because I was forced then, to really take control.
I wrote it all down in a notebook and was really, really honest with myself
about how much I owed.
And at that point I thought, "Right, let's take some action."
I was working all day in an office as a temp,
and then I'd work in a pub all evening.
I started doing car boot sales,
I started selling things on eBay,
I went online and I found this website
where you could respond to saucy text messages
and get paid per message.
I think it was only something like 15p a text
which doesn't sound like a lot,
but you would send hundreds and hundreds and hundreds.
I used to get a good few hundred quid a month
and then use that to chip away at more debt.
I probably felt a little bit guilty
that the people texting in thought I was some real hot, sexy,
you know, beautiful woman.
And actually I was just sat on the sofa with a baby attached to my boob.
In that eight months
I think I probably managed to work my way through
more than half of my debt.
Which sounds crazy,
but I literally went so hard at paying everything off.
I did that for some time and was managing it okay
but I still wanted to investigate ways that I could pay things back quicker.
And that's when I did debt snowballing.
I obviously haven't got snowballs.
But I'm a girl who likes herself some cake,
so I'm going to explain it to you in cake slices.
The first thing I did was organise my debts
from smallest to highest, regardless of interest rate.
You make the minimum payments across all of your debts,
except for the smallest, where you pay as much as you possibly can.
You then repeat this process until you've cleared your debts in full.
This way doesn't necessarily feel quicker...
psychologically it felt so much better.
I don't think there are really words to describe how liberating
it is to be debt-free.
In total I think it probably took me almost five years
which sounds like a really long time,
but honestly it was the best decision I made.