Budgeting to become debt free

Hello everyone, hope you are having a great Friday!

I have been contemplating for a long time to start a new niche and expand my blog based on that. I went through a rollercoaster of ideas and finally I realised that not only I should be writing about my personal drama but also I should be introducing you all to the thing that I am good at and that's budgeting.

Technically, I shouldn't be good in organising and creating a budget plan since I have ADHD, but through the trail of my life I learned the hard way that if I want to not only survive but also live, I need get my things together. I think I have talked about my past life before, but if you're new here, long story short, I was kinda poor. We were always living hanging by a thread and I started to despise that feeling. It feels like there's always some shit is about to go down and it's not fun to be honest to always have that anxiety as a child, even as an adult. So because of the way I used to live, I started changing my life to the better; to the point that I wouldn't need to be worried about next month's rent or buying a piece of clothes.

To be fair, I'm not quite there yet. I want to have more money and stability than I have now, but this is a good start.

My baseline for living anxiety free (only anxiety related to financial status) is to refuse to be in any debt whatsoever. I hate debt, I saw what it did to my family. They were always in debt, people coming or calling asking for their money and then when you've paid it finally, you have no money to pay the rent. It's just simply such a exhausting way to live and I believe that is almost always preventable.

So, you might ask, Saina, how could I be debt free? I don't know where to start!

Have this one simple rule in your mind: I will never borrow money from anyone, unless I really really have to. Let's not confuse things here. When I'm talking about "unless you have to" I don't mean that whenever you felt like ordering out or buying a new blender you can ask for money, I mean if you're getting evicted, or if you are starving. That's how I stay debt free.

Let me tell you a quick story so you would understand my point. when I finished my masters in another country as an immigrant I was poor af. I lived with my husband, we were both recently graduated, we were both unemployed and it was covid-19 era. I think generally we had around 1800 bucks and we had to live with that for two months, July and August. our visa was expired and we were in the grace period (a period in which you are allowed in the country but have no visa in order to find a job and be able to stay and not go back to your country). Not only we had to find a job to secure our place in a foreign country, but also we needed money so bad and you already know that in covid time there was no job to be found. I had couple of family members in neighbouring countries, so we decided that if we were about to starve or couldn't pay our rent, we would borrow money from them as our last option.

Long story short, I found a job in the middle of august and I had to ask my employer to pay me more upfront because our money was running out and we didn't have enough for September.

But here is the fucked up part. in that two months, we were rationing our food, buying only ingredients and eating very simple, things like boiled potato with onion and bread, our daily grocery budget was only 2 euros. Yes we were there and it was hard, but the whole time I refused to borrow any money from anyone and I was so lucky to have found a job, but the point is to prove to you that you need to be smart and resilient and manage your financial situation in a way that you stay debt free as much and as long as you can, even if it means limiting your daily grocery budget to 2 bucks a day.

I'm gonna be honest with you all, I think people that usually opt for borrowing are mentally lazy. They could even be working in an oil rig and be physically hardworking, but they refuse to use their brain potential, which is what annoys me the most. You are not poor, you have a valuable asset in you skull and you're not using it to its full potential. It's like having a locked chest full of gold in your home and you refuse to go for it because it's difficult to unlock? I believe you are much more capable than you think you are, you're just afraid to extract the abilities you have.

These are the things I did to stay debt free, which are good steps if you don't have any debt as of today. Also, try to stay debt free as much as you can unless you're in dire need. In my future posts, I will introduce ways and methods for those who already have debt and then I try to start simply on how to budget your income in order to be able to even save money and pay off your debts.

If you have any questions, or you need help with your own personal budgeting, contact me through the contact form at the bottom of homepage. It's free so go ahead and use my services before I get big and charge you:)))