Thread by @thepatwalls

After one full year, I'm officially free of credit card debt! 💳

So last year I realized I was in a horrible financial situation 😞

I had to sat down and made a REAL budget 💪

One year 👉 Paid off total of $24,705!! 😱

How I did it 👇

2/ First off, I want to talk about embarrassment. Nobody talks about their financials, unless of course, they are great! So I NEVER hear about other ppl in credit card debt.

This has made me feel like I'm a failure or that I can't even manage basic financials...

3/ So I hope this helps others out there feeling the same way.

Maybe it's how I was raised (my parents aren't great either with it) but I consider myself pretty savvy.

4/ How I got in this situation?

Living in places like SF and NY and never saving, living basically paycheck to paycheck. Then I did a coding boot camp and funded most of it off credit cards. Then I moved to NY.

Spending on my CC and thinking I'll figure it out later.

5/ Going on expensive trips with friends and funding it off my CC. Having friends that don't have to focus too much on budgeting (parents help them) and keeping up with their lifestyle.

6/ How I budgeted?

I've always been proactive in TRYING to save. But never found a good long-term solution. Mint.com and things like that don't work.

The only thing that works (for me) is sitting down and having a HARD look at my financials, and doing this often.

7/ So I created this spreadsheet.

More importantly, I set a reminder in my phone every Friday to sit down and copy my transactions line for line from my statement.

Then I'd aggregate it up into how much I've spent this week and how it looks in the grand scheme of my financials

8/ I categorized my expenses into a few categories:

Controlled - Food, drinks, fun, travel, etc.
Uncontrolled - Rent, utilities, payments.

I aimed to spend $500 on controlled/week. I rarely hit that, but having it as my baseline helped a lot.

9/ Another agreement with myself was to force myself to at least pay off any money I'd spent on the CC for that week. Every Friday.

So no matter what I was at least breaking even.

Any extra money I had in my bank acct I poured into paying off the principal.

10/ Another cool thing.

It wasn't just saving, I was also making money.

Spending less == going out less == more time to work on important things (like my business) == more money & less expenses.

It's a compounding effect.

11/ Lots of lifestyle changes. Drinking less and working out more. Running every day outside instead of a gym membership. Staying in and programming / learning about business/marketing & expanding my skillsets.

12/ And all of this took a year. Exactly a year.

But it started to become sort of fun. Because I was tracking everything so meticulously in my spreadsheet, it was like a game.

I looked forward to Fridays and logging all my income/expenses and seeing my progress.

13/ Kinda crazy what you can accomplish in a year.

I still have ~35k in student loan debt so hopefully I have an update for you soon on that.

But it feels amazing to be CC debt free! Thanks for reading as always 😁