It all started in June 2018, I was at my wits end with our finances, feeling alone, in over my head, and wishing for an easy way out. We had a mortgage, multiple credit cards, personal loans, a novated lease and despite having a great income we were living pay day to pay day.
I think altogether we had about $450,000 of debt in total ($70k was consumer debt). Not a day went by without my phone ringing over and over from companies calling about overdue payments. I had to obsessively check my accounts every day because we were constantly overdrawing them, and we had so many credit enquiries on our account that our credit rating was toast. I had a husband who didn’t care about any of it, he was happy to just tap that card and if it became overdrawn that was my problem to solve. We had a young daughter who I wanted to raise with the right attitude towards money, and a pug who, well, cost a lot of money.
So in my desperation for advice and answers, i turned to the BabyCentre forums. It made sense to me, I had a toddler, and I often went there for other types of advice from mums, so why not this? So i made my first post and added all my information… and waited. Within hours I was overwhelmed with responses, but it wasn’t positive. I was being attacked from all angles, abused for having a good income, shamed for my poor money management, and told I needed to do Dave Ramsey’s course immediately. One person mentioned the ‘debtfreecommunity’ hashtag on instagram though, so thats where I went.
And it was amazing! I spent the next week immersed in the community. It was helpful, it was supportive, and there was so many amazing, inspirational people. I wanted to join, but quickly realised there was no way i was signing up with my personal instragram. I was ashamed, embarrassed and did not want my situation out there publicly, so I decided to set up a dedicated debt free journey instagram, and thats when HotMessMoney was born!
It was one of the best decisions of my life. I learnt how to budget, I learnt about spending triggers, I realised over time how my attitudes towards money was influenced by my upbringing. I learnt about saving, investing, how to negotiate debt, how to break down goals and how to travel hack. Most importantly, I found a beautiful community of like minded people, several who have gone on to become wonderful friends!
So how did we get out of debt?
Honestly, it wasn’t easy, ours wasn’t a disciplined journey, we made a lot of mistakes and it took a lot longer than it should have. In future posts I’m going to document what we did each year, and how our journey towards the debt free life unfolded but for now I’ll summarise where we are today.
We are debt free! For now. We are about to start building our dream home, so we won’t be for much longer, but until the day we sign those mortgage papers we are enjoying our temporary debt free life.
Thanks for reading!
K @ HotMessMoney
HotMessMoney 