Your Commonly Asked Questions – Answered!

Y’all know what I love about our community? I love getting to know y’all better through comments and emails! It makes me so happy to hear your success stories and to cheer y’all on. That’s been my hope all along with TBM – to encourage others on this financial journey.

And because I receive a lot of emails asking me questions because y’all want to know me better, I thought I’d share a little Q&A post about me and my family’s real life on a budget from the most commonly asked questions from y’all!

What does your husband do for a living?

My hubs is a Commercial Real Estate Superintendent for a catastrophic claims company. If a high rise in Atlanta were to flood, they’d call my hubs’ company and my handsome husband would show up and oversea the project from the ground. His job is super crazy and just like earlier this week; he worked from 6am until 4am the next day and then was back at by 9am (not kidding…his job is for real insane). His job is super demanding and he is salary so no overtime. 🙁 This is why we still haven’t been able to film our Saver vs. Spender video because as soon as I asked for y’all’s questions, he got swamped again at work. But I promise that once things die back down for him, we’ll make the video. He’s really excited about it. 🙂

Why don’t you tithe?

Goodness y’all. Some folks just aren’t nice when it comes to this. In our One Income Budget for Our Family of Four post, I shared that we were not tithing this year in order to add more to our debt payoff. The thing is, we do in fact tithe when we can afford it (and I even give money from my blog earnings, which is outside our budget) and we give to our church in lots of other ways – after all, we’re supposed to give from our time, talent, and treasures. We’re not supposed to just give our money but also give of our services. So, for now we only tithe when there’s extra wiggle room in the budget and we’re working on making this more of priority, but please, y’all don’t worry about our souls because we’re not tithing. I promise we’ll be alright. 🙂

Do you like making your own laundry detergent?

Yes and no. Do I like using my own laundry detergent? Absolutely! I love that it lasts me a long time compared to store bought brands and I’m controlling the ingredients used. What I don’t like is the actual having to make it process. This is why in my money philosophy post, I shared that I do keep a bottle of store bought all natural laundry detergent on hand so if I get lazy or if life happens I can still do laundry.

Grab my homemade laundry detergent recipe here!

What is your best budgeting advice?

Keep it simple. Over the years, I’ve tried all sorts of budgeting systems and even crazy software and I’ve determined the best approach to budgeting is to keep it simple. The more complicated you make your budget, the more likely it is you won’t want to stick to it. Make it easy on yourself and keep things simple.

Posts that you can read more in-depth details on budget:

The 50/20/30 Budget
The Simple Budget
The Half Payment Method

Are you a CPA?

Nope. I have my Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting from Kennesaw State University but I don’t have any professional certifications. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that I’d have to study tax accounting in more depth, I would totally go after it, but I hate tax. Like for real. That’s why I pay a CPA to do our taxes because even though I have an accounting degree, my specialty is in Cost Management Accounting. I’m the person you’d want to hire to sniff out where you’re losing money and how you can better manage your money from a business standpoint. Don’t hire me to do your taxes, because then we’d both cry. :-/

I never knew you were going through hard times!

This isn’t really a question but something that I’ve heard from numerous friends and family when they found out that by 21 years old, I was nearly bankrupted. The reason I included this in this post is to showcase that we don’t always know who may be struggling financially. When someone tells us “no” to dinner or drinks, we don’t need them to give us a reason, instead we need to say “okay – is there something you’d like to do instead or do you want to schedule for another night?” That person may not be struggling like I was financially, but if they are attempting to stick to a budget and have the courage to tell you “no” to your kind offer, be kind enough to understand that they’re really saying “thank you so much, but right now isn’t a good time for us”.

How did you accumulate so much debt?

This question is usually referring to my just over $11,000 of credit card debt that I managed to accumulate in the span of 3 years. Seriously, that is a lot of dang money but what’s sad, is that my story is not uncommon. I was foolish with my money despite being raised to know better. I had to figure out for myself that a piece of plastic is not real money – cash is. It’s one of the main reasons why my hubs and I are trying so hard to make carrying cash only a priority – we want our boys to see what money actually looks like and to not get our debit card confused with a credit card.

The simple answer here is that I wanted too much stuff – that Coach purse (still my downfall, which is why I’m thankful I found ThredUp *), those designer clothes, that new furniture (because apparently I thought I deserved to have something nicer than my hand-me-down couch), and a zillion other things that I have no memory of purchasing. This is why I strive so hard to have contentment in my life – because a bunch of stuff isn’t going to make me happy and it certainly won’t get me into heaven.

Are you a cradle Catholic? Is your husband Catholic?

Yes, I’m a cradle Catholic which means that I was baptized, raised, and confirmed in the Catholic Church from the time I was an infant. My husband is not Catholic and in fact, when I married him he was an Atheist…no joke (I’ll be sharing this story in more detail in October). He is now a baptized Christian and attends Mass every Sunday that he does not have to work which is awesome and is such an amazing blessing for our family to all get to sit together during Mass and pray. (And admittedly keeps me sane 🙂 )

How do you earn so much on Swagbucks?

I try to go on Swagbucks at least once a day for 15 minutes. If I have more time, I’ll complete a longer survey but for the most part, I am more efficient when I cut my time short. I also use Swagbucks to search for things so I can earn SBs and I refer all my friends and family (pretty sure they’re tired of the emails 😉 ). This all helps me to earn a pretty steady stream of additional income from Swagbucks and is in fact how we’re paying for our debt-free Christmas this year.

More on generating additional income:

How to Generate More Income
4 Ways for SAHMs to Make Money Online
How We Paid off $5,000 of Debt in One Month

How did you get your husband on board with becoming debt-free?

I know my hubs, just as I’m sure you know your spouse. I know that if I approach a subject in a certain way, I have a better chance of him listening to me and taking what I’m saying seriously. So, that’s what I did.

My hubs likes proof and lots of data to back up any of my claims so after I read The Total Money Makeover * and was all drinking the get-out-of-debt KoolAid, I made a plan for how we were going to get out of debt, ran numbers and then showed them all to my husband. I showed him how at what we were currently paying every month we weren’t going to be out of debt until we were at retirement age. And since at the time we were expecting our second child, I showed him how much we were currently paying towards our debt (which was only the minimums on everything) and how much I expected our other expenses to go up once Collin was born.

Once I was able to show him how in the red we were going to be, he was sold. He handed me his credit card and told me to cut it up and asked how we could make this work. Again, I already had the answer to his question ready with my plan so he was put at ease but he was amped up and found ways to generate more money by working side hustles of his own. I can honestly say to you that being on this journey towards 100% debt-freedom has brought us closer together in a way I never imagine! It’s amazing how much more of a “team” we’ve become since taking on this challenge. So, I encourage you to talk to your spouse about it if you haven’t already.

You can find more of my posts about Marriage and Money here.

Got any questions for me? Feel free to contact me or ask away in the comments! 🙂

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