Hi, I’m Claire. And not too long ago, I was drowning in $85,000 of debt. I know. It’s a lot.
Credit cards, everyday expenses, and the kind of financial stress that follows you to bed at night had all piled up until I genuinely didn’t know what to do with myself. I kept thinking something has to change, but for a long time, I didn’t actually do anything about it. I just… avoided it.
Until one evening, I finally stopped avoiding it.
I sat down at my kitchen table, opened my banking app, and made myself add it all up. The credit cards. The line of credit. The personal loans. A few small balances I’d been pretending didn’t exist for years.
The total? $85,000.
I sat there for a minute just staring at it. It felt like standing at the bottom of a mountain with no idea where the trail started. But instead of closing the app and going back to ignoring everything, I made myself a promise: I was going to face this thing head on.
Eighteen months later, I’d paid off $22,000 of it.
Here’s exactly how I did it.
Step 1: I Built a Budget I Could Actually Stick To
I’d tried budgeting before and failed, mostly because I made it too complicated or too restrictive. This time, I kept it simple and used the 50/30/20 rule as my starting point. Yes there are others however this rule best applies to my spending habits.
If you haven’t heard of it, the idea is straightforward:
- 50% of your income goes to needs ( rent, groceries, utilities, transportation, insurance)
- 30% goes to wants (dining out, subscriptions, shopping, fun stuff)
- 20% goes to savings and debt repayment
Needs (50%) $1,900
Wants (30%) $1,140
Savings & Debt (20%) $760
But here’s what I actually did. I looked at that $1,140 “wants” category and thought: what if I didn’t spend all of that?
So I cut it. Hard. My real spending ended up looking more like this:
- Needs: $1,900
- Wants: $500
- Debt payments: $1,400
Step 2: I Used the Debt Snowball Method
With a budget in place, I needed a plan for which debt to tackle first. I went with the debt snowball method, and honestly, it was the right call for me not just financially, but emotionally.
The idea is simple: you list your debts from smallest to largest, throw every extra dollar at the smallest one, and make minimum payments on everything else. Once that smallest debt is gone, you take what you were paying on it and roll it into the next one. And so on.
My list looked something like this:
1. Credit Card A — $2,300
2. Credit Card B — $4,700
3. Personal Loan — $6,500
4. Line of Credit — $12,500
5. (And the rest…)
It’s called a snowball because your payments genuinely do get bigger over time. Watching that first credit card hit zero felt incredible. It gave me momentum I hadn’t expected.
Step 3: I Tracked Every Single Payment
This sounds small, but it might have been the thing that kept me going.
Every time I made a payment, I wrote it down. I used a debt tracker to watch my balances shrink in real time. What started as this huge, scary number slowly slowly started moving. And once I could see it moving, I got almost competitive about it. I wanted to make the number go down faster.
Debt had felt like something happening to me. Tracking it made me feel like I was doing something about it.
The Math: How $1,400/Month Becomes $22,000 Gone
Here’s the simple version:
$1,400/month × 18 months = $25,200 paid
A portion of that went toward interest, so the actual amount knocked off my principal was about $22,000. It wasn’t magic. It was just consistency, month after month after month.
The Little Changes That Added Up
I want to be honest: I also made a lot of small lifestyle changes that freed up extra money. None of them felt life-changing on their own, but together they made a real difference:
- Cooking at home way more often
- Cancelling subscriptions I’d forgotten I even had
- Selling stuff around the house I wasn’t using
- Actually planning my grocery trips instead of winging it
- Setting a weekly spending limit and sticking to it
The Part Nobody Talks About: The Mindset Stuff
Here’s what I didn’t expect going into this. The hardest part wasn’t the math. It was my own head.
For years, spending had been my way of dealing with stress. Bad day? Online shopping. Feeling anxious? Treat yourself. Getting serious about debt meant learning to sit with discomfort instead of swiping my way out of it. That was genuinely hard.
But something shifted after a few months. Instead of dreading my bank account, I started looking forward to checking it. The numbers were going in the right direction. That felt like something. It felt like control, maybe for the first time in a long time.
Why Tracking Tools Actually Help
If you take one thing from this, let it be this: track your money.
I’m not talking about anything fancy. A simple budget template and a debt tracker spreadsheet were all I used. But being able to see where my money was going and seeing my debt shrinking week by week ; that visibility is what kept me consistent when I wanted to give up.
Where I’m at Now
I still have debt. I want to be upfront about that. $22,000 gone doesn’t mean the journey is over. But I have something now that I didn’t have 18 months ago: a real plan, and the proof that it actually works.
Why I Started Writing About This
I started this blog because I wish someone had laid all of this out for me when I was sitting at that kitchen table staring at $85,000. Not in a preachy way. Not with a perfect, unrealistic plan. Just honestly, here's what worked, here’s what was hard, and here’s how you can start.
So that’s what I’m going to share here. Real budgeting strategies, debt payoff methods, tips for managing money when you’re living paycheque to paycheque, and the mindset shifts that actually make a difference.
If I could chip away at $85,000 in debt on a $3,800/month income, you can make progress too. It just takes a starting point.
Let’s figure yours out together.
