***This is my guest post on The Huffington Post. To go ahead and read the full story, head here or start reading below!
If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time, you know that the first budget I ever created on my own as an adult was out of sheer desperation.
I was broke. Flat broke. I was facing an eviction notice on my door and I was in over $11,000 of credit card debt….not including the fancy brand-new car I had sitting out front of my apartment.
I remember crying into my dog, Bruno’s fur feeling the suffocating weight of my financial disaster. I honestly didn’t know what to do. I felt so lost and alone and I was only 21 years old.
How was the rest of my life going to go if starting out was landing me so deep in the hole I could no longer see daylight? As I sobbed into Bruno’s fur, I sank further and further into my self-pity. I found myself wanting my mommy so she could take all the pain away, knowing that my mama wouldn’t be able to do anything for me.
I had made this mess and I was the only one capable of pulling myself out.
So as I sat on my couch that was costing me a fortune in interest, I thought back to the lessons that my mama taught me about making a budget. I could never understand as a kid why having to create this thing called a budget was so important but now, as a broke 20-something, it was my safety net.
It was my call back home and out of the darkness. I wiped my face and sat down at my dining room table with just a calculator, pen, the back of an envelope, and my stack of bills and bank statement and I made my first budget.
It was probably the worst budget ever created but it was my lifeline. It saved my life that night because by making that budget I had accepted responsibility for cleaning up my mess.
The thing is, that budget showed just how BAD I was – how horrible my financial picture was. I was so far in the red it seemed like my calculator was computing a different language. I honestly had no idea how I was going to get myself out of my mess but that budget was my very first baby step towards cleaning up my mistakes.
I not only wanted to share a little of my story with you, but offer up a very simple way to get started with budgeting right now (especially if you’ve never created one before).
To read the full post, head here to The Huffington Post.
The post What Saved My Financial Life appeared first on Jessi Fearon.