Pals, after two years of massive debt repayment I can finally say I am 100% debt free. Do you know what that feels like? It feels like the freaking party emoji.

I have been in debt since I got my first credit cards at 16. Since then the amount of debt has vacillated from completely manageable to massive. And the amount of stress and anxiety that goes along with that has been exhausting! Thanks to the past two years of busting my ass, and literally portioning out about half of my paychecks to debt repayment I am finally free of the mess I created over the past 15 years. 

As a reward (in cash, of course, part of my new habit of buying in cash only ever or not at all), came this Karl 24cm BOYY bag, purchased on sale if you can believe it from Farfetch. 

To anyone struggling to pay down cards, I will say this:
Keep with it!
It's a challenge to continually watch your paychecks essentially go to credit card payments and the urge to shop and reward your efforts will be strong sometimes. Just don't!

Pin it Instead!
Every time I felt like buying myself something new I would Pin the item to a new Pinterest board (private of course) and then wait for a couple days to truly asses if I could a) afford it in cash, b) would really need the item I wanted or if I could do without it. Shockingly, 99% of the time, the item was an impulse moment that I would have usually indulged. 

Google Sheets is your new Shopping Buddy
Make a new spreadsheet with a column on the far left and itemize every single mandatory payment you have to make per month and on the right two columns one where you document total owed to those companies and another column of what you plan to pay that month towards that. If it's rent then it's 100% of the amount, it if's debt it's what you can!

The goal with this is to add up the columns to see your debt to income ratio and to really get a grasp of where your money is going per month and what you truly have as discretionary income. It's amazing how much I was denying my bad financial habits until I started seeing the patterns with this new Google Sheets practice.