Budget Archives - Page 2 of 95 - Making Sense Of Cents

12 Strategies I Used To Avoid Getting Buried in Student Loan Debt

November 9, 2018 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 7 Comments

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Today, I have a great guest post from Matt from Method To Your Money. Here are the strategies he used to graduate (nearly) debt-free from college.

12 Strategies I Used To Avoid Getting Buried in Student Loan Debt #payoffstudentloans #studentloans #debtfreejourney #moneysavingtips If you’re getting ready to attend college, or if you’ve got kids who are preparing to go off to school, student loans can sometimes feel like a forgone conclusion.

In fact, over 70% of graduates leave school with significant student loan debt. That’s 44 million people who owe $1.5 TRILLION dollars, or around $37,000 per person!!

It’s all a bit INSANE!!

But what if I told you that I have found a way to avoid being one of those indebted graduates, a series of strategies to avoid the anchor of student loans and to start your career off on the right foot? A method that I’m already starting to instill in my children so that when they go to college, they’ll be fully prepared to CRUSH it both in the classroom and with their bank accounts.

My family was firmly entrenched in the middle class. My dad is a pastor and my is mom a nurse. Growing up, money was not a limitless resource and my parents always made decisions with finances in mind. [Read more…]

Reclaim Your Day With These 12 Time Saving Tips

November 5, 2018 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 15 Comments

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Reclaim Your Day With These 12 Time Saving Tips #timesavingtips #time Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day. What you do with them is up to you, but you may be wasting time each day. I wish I could say that I wasn’t wasting time, but I definitely find ways to do so. Fortunately, with the time saving tips I’ll share today, you can reclaim some of that lost time.

The bad thing about wasting time is that it can hold you back from reaching your goals.

If you are able to figure out where in your day you are wasting time, you may be able to:

Start a side hustle.
Make more money.
Pay off debt.
Spend more time with your loved ones.
Learn a new skill.
Have more fun.
Travel more.
Reach your dreams, and more!

[Read more…]

6 Things You Can Do Today to Find Over $13,000 in Savings

November 4, 2018 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 9 Comments

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

This is a guest post from Empower, the FREE savings app. They’ve help more than 250,000 users get out of paycheck-to-paycheck living and even build a savings by analyzing their accounts for opportunities to save. They’ve dug into their strove of data to tell you where you may be leaving money on the table. Enjoy!

Raise your hand if you're tired of reading articles about saving money. Why is it that these articles can be so frustrating — but we can't help but click when we see the headline?

So much content falls short, more often telling us to do extreme things like selling our plasma than helping us find everyday savings opportunities. It doesn't always seem like the need to save is being taken seriously by those offering tips.

But between student loans, a rising cost of living, and pay that doesn't seem to increase as quickly as our work hours, the squeeze is very serious. That's why we could all use help finding ways to save. So we dug into some data to discover real ways that real people can find savings in their current lifestyles. [Read more…]

Finding Freedom And Happiness In A Materialistic World

October 29, 2018 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 28 Comments

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Finding Freedom And Happiness In A Materialistic World The idea for this post came after watching an episode of Rich Kids of Instagram. I honestly don’t watch a lot of TV (just a few hours a month, at the most, is the norm for me because we don't have Netflix, cable, or local channels), but somehow I found this show and got sucked in.

These people are wealthy, like super wealthy, but the show was basically about spending money to impress other people.

And, my main thought the whole time was why do people care so much about STUFF?

As I was watching what was happening in the show, my jaw hit the floor a few times. It's just crazy what people spend their money on, the things people will do to flaunt their wealth, and the lengths people will go to in order to chase material items.

I'm sure some of these people were actually happy, but I don't think that's the norm for the average wealthy person. More importantly, it shouldn’t be the norm for the average American. [Read more…]

10 Ways To Save Money For The Average Person

October 27, 2018 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 5 Comments

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

This post is brought to you by CJ Affiliate’s VIP Content Service. While this was a sponsored opportunity from CIT Bank, all content and opinions expressed here are my own. See site for details and disclosures.

Everyone wants to save more money, right? In reality, I haven't met to many people who say that they save too much. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, I actually never have, haha!

If you're looking for money saving strategies, then you've come to the right place.

As a personal finance expert, I see a lot of ways that people may be wasting their money, or, at least, not saving money to their best potential.

Even if you're already taking part in some of these money saving strategies, if you could just find a couple more ways, you may be able to reach your financial goals a little more quickly. [Read more…]

Parents Paying For College – Is This A Good Idea?

October 22, 2018 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 36 Comments

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Parents Paying For College - Is This A Good Idea? #shouldparentspayforcollege #parentspayforcollege #collegedebt Do you think parents should help pay for their children’s college education? Do you think parents should be required to pay for their children’s college education?

These are tough questions to ask and to answer, but they are very important when thinking about the ever increasing cost of higher education.

These kinds of questions are quite personal to me and relevant to my blog. A major motivation for starting Making Sense of Cents was my $40,000 student loan debt (you can read about how I paid off my student loans in just 7 months).

My student loan debt was higher than the average $30,000 per student, and surprisingly, it is often parents paying for college by taking out loans to cover kid’s education.

I've read countless stories of parents who have $200,000 in student loan debt for their children, and it’s these parents paying for college who have found that these debts are causing them to struggle financially, unable to reach their retirement goals, etc. These parents end up drowning in debt because they just honestly want to help their children get through college. What they don’t realize, though, is that there are other ways to help your kids graduate from college. [Read more…]

How We Visited 8 New Countries in 2 Years – While Also Paying Off 58k in Student Debt

October 19, 2018 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 3 Comments

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Recently, a reader contacted me and told me about how her and her husband paid off around $58,000 of student loan debt in 2 years, all while traveling. Below is their story. Enjoy!

I always knew I wanted to travel. Ever since I was a little girl watching enviously as my older sister went abroad for the first time, I knew traveling was going to be in my future.

However, I was still unsure how I was actually going to make it happen. As I inched closer to my graduation date from Boston College in 2014, I became increasingly concerned because I had no real career path in mind (or even a trail or a gap in the woods to be honest). My husband (though we were only dating at the time) and I had 58k of student loans between us but all we wanted to do was travel.

So, how did we combine our dream of international adventures with the reality of crushing student loan debt? These are the exact steps we used to make it happen, along with some advice for anyone who is interested in following in our footsteps! [Read more…]

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