Money, Money, Taxes, Bullarchy, Money, Money

I am damn near twenty-seven years old and for some reason I am still learning money management. If you were raised like me, and if you were a millennial, you probably were, you learned how to balance a check book and that you absolutely need a degree in order to get a career (bullarchy). That is what they drilled into us in school. That was about it. I don't know about you, but I have used my checkbook twice in the five years that I've had it. In fact, do those things expire? That's probably something I should look into.

So now, I am getting married. I already have a kid, so I have already kind of learned the fun checks and balances of "I really don't need this because I need the money to pay for (insert important bill here)" but we want to buy a house.

So I bought Credit Repair for Dummies, House Buying for Dummies, and Color My Credit. And I started reading. I was never the studying type, but I love reading these books. It makes me so angry that no one ever told us in school that so many things other than credit cards and loans show up on your credit report, like:

• Any jobs you have/had
• Your phone number (which kind of confused me but okay)
• ANY address you had even if you didn't change your address ever in your entire life
• Any credit check (even those soft checks show up on the full report)

Also, when I first turned eighteen and got into college and all those wonderful credit card companies started contacting me about opening credit cards, no one explained to me how exactly those worked and that signing up for seven of them when you worked part time at a pizza place was a terrible idea.

So of course, my very first collections just fell off of my report. Important note: it takes seven years for things like that to stop showing up on your credit report. Unless you apparently really fight it, but I'm still learning about that and from what I understand it's not exactly easy. It is however, possible to get them to stop contacting you. If you have collections agencies calling you every day, you can ask them to stop, with a letter. They aren't supposed to keep doing that if you tell them to stop. Isn't that crazy? Although, also from what I've read, you should pay them off and get it done and over with, but you can usually negotiate the price down. So talk to them about what they would be willing to take, rather than just agreeing to a payment plan for the full amount.

ANYWAY, after the Covid stuff subsided here a bit (so not at all but stuff started opening again), I got a new job, I'm slowly getting back on track for life. Or trying to. I pulled my full credit report, which you can do once a year, for free, without effecting your credit score by going to annualcreditreport.com, you can pull all three reports from the bureaus. I followed the Color My Credit way of going through my reports which made it so easy to figure out what was actually important and what was well... not necessary to look into too much. I also follow her on TikTok and her advice is amazing and she is hilarious and I highly recommend her if your trying, like me, to reeducate yourself on all things finances.

I also did some research with the Gordon Ramsey way of doing things, which gets bashed A LOT. So first what I will list is what I like about his way of doing things:

• Listing out all of your debts from smallest to largest
• Having an emergency fund of $1,000 at all times
• Investing 15%of your income in retirement
• Building wealth and giving
• That he calls them "babysteps" even though some of these are pretty huge steps

I do not agree that the first step should be the $1,000 emergency fund. I think it's a wonderful idea and a great goal to work towards actively, but if you have other steps that you feel come first, they should in fact, come first. I also don't agree in paying your debts from smallest to largest. Well it's nice to see those debts disappear and it's easy to accomplish the smaller debts first... I've found (in my not large amount of time studying and learning the ins and outs of repairing credit) that it's better to find which of your debts has the largest interest rate first. It's nice to have the debts listed out in smallest amount to largest amount, because they will probably stay this way for a while, but I have a second list that lists out all of my debts starting with the one with the highest interest rate and going down. I make the biggest payment to the highest interest rate and then minimum payments on the rest, unless I can afford to do more.

My other and last piece of advice for this article is to do two things if you are very serious about money scrounging and getting on track to being debt free, you should try couponing and you should look for a side income. Writing articles is one of my side incomes. My other is selling Scentsy, which you get out the amount of effort you put in. I do not recommend MLMs unless you have free time to commit to them. But being an Uber driver, or even just looking for a delivery driver job on some nights. I also very recommend being a bartender if you have the time - I, being a mom and planning a wedding, no longer have that time. But it was some of the best money I made. As for couponing, I am not an extreme couponer, but I do make my grocery list ahead of time, I stick to a grocery budget, and before I leave, I scroll through my coupons app (Ibotta) to find if anything on my grocery list can save me some money.

That is all for this quick tip money lesson. I'll break down in more detail in my next lesson. And even show you a glimpse of my financial binder (please don't judge when reading my monthly goals). Good luck, millennial, keep your heads up, and don't forget that when someone won't educate you, you simply need to head to the library and do it yourself. We are the DIY-ers, we can do this!