Journey to a frugal lifestyle. This is my newest journey and I am going to document it right here on my blog.
I am going to give a little background to my life. So I am opening up on here in hopes that this reaches the right audience. And to give you a little bit of an insight on my new journey.
Journey to a Frugal Lifestyle
I have been struggling. Struggling with my finances for a long time now. I am a single mother, who is in college full time. And I also work a retail store job. I’ve tried to find other jobs but I don’t have the means of transportation right now. So I am stuck working a low-income job for the mean time. I also am an entrepreneur so I have a few sources of passive income, including this blog.
I had my son when I was 20 years old and I dropped everything I was doing to take care of him. This included college at the time. I had just completed my first year of college, and so I went into the workforce. I got my first real job and I worked there for years. We got our first apartment, my first brand new car, everything was great.
But covid hit in 2020 and I eventually was laid off my job and have had the worst time finding a new job to replace that income ever since. I had worked my way up into a title examiner position and was in that position for a little over 9 months before I was laid off. Most people need degrees or certifications for that job but I just got lucky.
Baby #2 Came
Since I was laid off and having a hard time finding a job, I decided to go back to school. My boyfriend Devon, had a pretty good job at the time so it was okay for me to stay at home and take care of the kids and he worked.
Fast forward to this past year, I am in my second almost third year into my bachelors degree and we had our second baby. Devon unfortunately lost his job and so now we had no income coming in. We moved back in with my parents and we have a new born baby who is just 5 months old.
We both have side hustles that bring in a decent little amount of income but we both are now unemployed. With his IT background he will find something amazing, I just know it. But in the mean time we both are returning into the workforce at lower paying jobs until we find something that works for both of us.
And since we have the new baby we have to work opposite shifts to avoid having to spend extra money on child care. Which for a baby so young is so expensive.
Credit is poor
Throughout the years, especially when I was a single mom living on my own with my son. I got myself in quite a bit of debt that I was frequently only making minimum payments on or even missing payments often. This was my fault and I take full responsibility but now I have almost the worst credit I could have ever imagined.
I don’t even attempt to apply for anything new now because I know I will be most likely declined. That’s why I started looking into creating passive income for myself. But I have a shopping problem and I it is going to take everything inside me to change my ways.
And because we had no income coming in we had to get out of our apartment lease early and we owe those apartments $5000 for breaking our leases. Luckily, it’s not a eviction but it is something we are going to have to pay off if we want to get a new apartment on our own.
Journey to a frugal lifestyle; Goals
On this journey to a frugal lifestyle, my first goal is to save $5000 in 12 months. I am pretty positive with hard work and dedication we can accomplish this. I want this goal to be one of my own, aside from my partners saving.
It’s always good to have your own savings aside from you boyfriend/girlfriend just incase something happens. If we were married I’d have different goals in mind. But for now we are going to be separating our money and savings. He has two other kids on his own that he takes care of. And I have Jaxon and Harleigh.
My short term goal is to open a secured credit card with my bank and starting rebuilding my credit. I want to rebuild my credit so that way when we are ready to get on our own again I’ll have better credit to hopefully rent or purchase my first home. My goal is to get my credit to the low 600s in the next 12 months and then to 650 by 18 months.
My journey to a frugal lifestyle is my journey towards self-discovery. I love budgeting and planning and I am a business major. I want to eventually own my own business one day, so I have to get everything good for when that happens.
Conclusions
I plan to follow the Dave Ramsey program again, and once I get the extra money I am going to pay for that and start really pushing to making that happen. The cash envelopes have really worked for me in the past. And I know it’s going to work out for me now I just got to get my stuff together.
Follow me on my journey. I plan on posting updates here on my blog and also documenting my journey on Youtube.
Have a wonderful day!
[…] My Birthday […]