What Life is Like After 10 YEARS of Being Debt Free!

It's been 10 years since I paid off at $35,000 in student loan debt in just two years, five months on a $37,000 income. So I wanted to share with you how life has been different in the past decade and then also pretty much the same. Yes, even the same in this video. Let's do it. Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. I'm your host, Justine. Here we talk about financial confidence, ways to crush debt, that leads to more fun and fewer payments. If you are not subscribed, go ahead and click that red subscribe button. Thank you so much to Rocket Money for sponsoring today's video. Rocket Money is an app that can help you cancel subscriptions, lower your bills and manage your money all in one app, but more on that in just a bit. So let's start with the similarities because I feel like people are like, oh, well, a decade of being debt free of no debt payments, then surely you should be like upgrading your lifestyle. And yes, there is a little bit of that, but also I'm still doing very much the same things. Number one, I'm still monitoring my food spending and meal planning. This is something that I feel like, especially now where food inflation has just gone up and up more recently that I am tracking that. I am diligently grocery budgeting, making sure that I have a meal plan in place. The way that I like to do my meal plans because people are like, oh my gosh, you have to meal plan for every day of the week. No, you don't. That would be, I would not stick to that plan. What I like to do is I like to meal plan three meals. So three weeknight dinner meals. And then what I typically do is I make extra. So I'm doubling this recipe. If it's for two, then I'm doubling it for four. The reason I do that is because then we can eat on the leftovers throughout the week. Then we can put some in the freezer to save for a later date. This has helped me so much with my cost savings. This is something that I did when I was paying off debt that I'm still doing now is meal planning and grocery budgeting. The second similarity is I'm still budgeting on all aspects of my spending every single month and there are, if you're like, I can't get down with a spreadsheet and you're like, I need something convenient that's going to tell me exactly where my spending, where my money is going, then you definitely need to check out rocket money. Rocket money is so unique. One of the benefits that I love about rocket money is that they can negotiate your bills. Yes, they can negotiate your bills. Things like internet, your cell phone plans. They're going to, once you sync up your financial accounts and then they can see all of your different transactions, they're going to look at all of your bills, all of your subscriptions. They're going to take a look at what bills can be negotiated. So how easy is that to upload a photo and then have them do the negotiating on your behalf that just saves you so much time and headache throughout your week. And I love that they can locate and cancel your subscriptions. Think about just a plethora of plethora of subscriptions that you have just going. Some things that you probably don't even know that you do have and that you're not utilizing. So it can help you save money by locating and canceling. If you use that rocket money concierge to cancel those subscriptions on your behalf. In fact, if you take advantage of all the apps features, it can help you save up to $740 a year. In fact, it's helped all of its customers save over $500 million a year and canceled subscriptions. I think where rocket money really shines is not only the subscriptions, but also helping you locate those spending habits and patterns. It told me exactly how many times I haunt target and it was a lot. And so it just gets you in this mindset of figuring out, okay, how much should I be spending in these areas? Is this reflective of my values? If you would like to try rocket money, head over to rocket money.com slash debt free millennials so that you can get better with your finances. Thank you so much to rocket money for sponsoring this video and supporting the channel. Numbers three, the same thing that I did when I was in debt that I'm doing now as a debt free person is a shop smart. I'm looking for online coupons. I am looking for sales. I'm asking for multiple quotes now, so, so multiple quotes in terms of car insurance or I'm looking at options for maybe cell phone carriers, that sort of thing. You want to make sure that you're shopping smart and if you can at all costs, avoid painful price. Number four, I still buy secondhand items on Facebook marketplace. I love doing this. Like why not? Why not get a discount? Like I love buying secondhand furniture. I just did this for my second baby's nursery. Got a brand, got a dresser, a brand new to me dresser, but a used dresser looks awesome. It retails brand new for a thousand bucks. I got it for 400 saving $600. This is something that I did when I was in debt and was buying things secondhand, buying secondhand furniture. It's amazing. I still do that. I would probably always do it to be honest. Number five, I save cash for big ticket items so I can remember specifically my big ticket items when I was in debt are not the same big ticket items that I'm saving for now, but it's still the same concept. I still paid cash for this. Example, when I was in debt, I needed a new mattress and so I was shopping for a new mattress. I ended up purchasing one for $600. I actually did the same thing. Now being debt free, that mattress is significantly more expensive than $600. It was more like three grand. Am I happy with my purchase back then? Yes. Am I happy with my purchase now? Hell yes. And in both cases I saved cash for it. Number six, similarities when I was in debt and now Kyle and I talk about big purchases before we make them. Now when I was paying off debt, we were not married at the time, but we were dating and he was in a lot of ways my accountability partner. He was kind of verifying, checking in with me on my spending so that we knew, okay, if the goal is for me to be debt free before we get married, what are some things that we can kind of scale back on so that we can make this a reality. Likewise now that I'm debt free, of course, you know, now we're partners, like we're married. This is something that we are going to talk about. So agree on a spending level. If you are in a relationship, it might be $100, it might be $500, whatever you guys are comfortable with. Say, Hey, I'm not going to make this purchase, this $500 purchase, unless I check in with you first. You avoid the arguments, you avoid any kind of tension. The benefit is you get on the same page before you make the purchase. Okay. This is the part of the video that I want to talk about that I think you're going to be really interested in is the differences between, you know, that, that 24 year old, that 25 year old girl, and now 35 year old woman, I guess it's like grew into a woman the past decade, but these are the biggest differences. Okay. So the first one is I spent nearly 10 years living in Southern California. I did not do that when I was paying off debt, when I was paying off debt, I was living in Kansas city and then Manhattan, Kansas cost of living was a lot lower. Once I became debt free, it afforded us the ability to move to a higher cost of living area like San Diego, where I spent majority of those 10 years and then spent the last year and a half, almost two years living in Los Angeles. It was incredible. I knew that if I had that debt, that would have not been possible or I would have been seriously on the struggle bus and living like inland in inland Southern California, it would have not been pretty. Number two, I've been self employed for eight years. The last seven years being with debt free millennials. Before I started debt free millennials, I had a marketing consulting agency. So I was a solopreneur, I was providing marketing consulting services to small businesses, mainly copywriting, email marketing, website stuff, that sort of thing. And I don't know if I would have been able to take that leap had I still had those debt payments. The next thing is that's different. That's mega different is I can afford things more quickly and I can afford more expensive things if I want to. So not necessarily buy the expensive things just because you can buy the expensive things because it reflects quality. It reflects your values. It reflects longevity. So an example of this is like the mattress, right? So the mattress that we bought now, I know that was an investment. We're going to have that mattress for a very, very long time. Same thing with cars. So we're going to purchase a car that we know we're going to drive for the next 12 years until the wheels fall off. Also nice vacations, a house. So some of these bigger items I can really start justifying because I know that it's reflective of how we're going to be spending and what I look for in products. Not buying the cheap thing because that's the only thing I can afford, but really looking at the quality of an item and justifying that as a way to say, okay, this is going to be sustainable and this is something that's going to last a really long time. I do that with clothes. Now I used to buy a lot of secondhand clothes. I still like doing stuff like clothing dupes. So dupes that like a Lululemon dupe that I can find on Amazon, I really love to do that. But when I find like a nice jean or like a nice heel, like my sister talked me into a Mark Fisher pumps that I was like, this would be great for public speaking, for networking, for just work in general. Go look them up. They're not, they're not cheap, but they will last a long time because I know it's quality. Okay. The next major difference, and this is a big one. I'm a homeowner. I bought a house. I saved 20% for a down payment. I actually saved more than the 20% from the home that we bought and we pocketed the difference and we put that difference into a major kitchen renovation. It was so awesome to be able to say, yes, I put 20% down on this house and I had money left over to do a kitchen renovation. That's reflective of what we value, time cooking together, having family come over, being able to sit around our countertop and just have fun, eat, chat. This has been so awesome. I think that's a really awesome difference between what I was working on and where I'm at now. Another big, big difference. I created a family. This was not something, I was a single person, you know, most of my debt free, all of my debt free journey, I was a single person and then got married and now I have a beautiful three and a half year old and I have another little one on the way due very, very soon. And so it's just really awesome to know that debt payments are not part of my family equation and that I'm setting up my kids for financial success because I'm going to, Kyle and I are going to be role models. You know, we're going to model what financial success looks like. So I think that's so great. The last difference here, and this is fun, is I've expanded my budget to include more categories that I did not previously had, had when I was paying off debt. So things like I had shopping and clothes, but more specifically I plugged in home decor, a home decor budget, I plugged in a home upgrades budget. These were things that were not really part of my budget when I was working on my debt payoff plan. And so it's really fun to include these, uh, fun money. We had a bucket list category when we were in LA because we were like, we want to take advantage of the city. And so let's throw money at all of the LA bucket list experiences. Like we want to go to the Getty, we want to go to the Dodgers museum. We want to go to Griffith observatory, like all the iconic places in LA. And so we were able to do those things because we had a fun money kind of bucket list LA category budget category. Okay. So I'd love to know what was the most surprising difference or similarity for you as you think about pivoting from being in debt to now life on the other side is just been so fantastic. I'm so grateful and thankful for the 22, 23 year old me who decided that a 10 year payment plan on student loans was just BS and that I was not going to live in this life of payments anymore. So I'm so thankful for her because it's created me almost like getting a little in my fields right now. It's a vibe. That's fine. Um, if you want to try out rocket money and just feel better about your finances and just get that awareness, head over to rocket money.com slash debt free millennials. I will leave a link below for you to check that out. Thank you so much. Rocket money for sponsoring this video. And if you liked this one, give it a big thumbs up. I'll catch you in the next one.