The unique budgeting system that helped this single mom pay off $77,000 in debt

For years, personal finance expert and single mom Kumiko Love, 33, struggled to pay off her student loans. Even with a successful career in finance, everything she tried to do to pay off debt failed.

“I tried every budgeting method out there,” Love tells NBC News BETTER. “Percentage budgeting, calendar budgeting, I tried the cash envelopes, I tried the half payment method, I tried monthly budgeting, and every single time at the end of the month I would come up short.”

Love, founder of the popular personal finance blog The Budget Mom, realized that managing her spending and debt was much easier if she focused on budgeting for each paycheck instead of trying to budget for the entire month.

“When I started budgeting my money by paycheck every single time I got paid, and I was allocating every dollar for a purpose when I received my paycheck, I started finding myself succeeding, I started finding myself actually saving money and having more to throw down towards debt,” Love says.

So she developed her own system, which she calls “the budget-by-paycheck method,” which helped her pay off $77,000 in three years.

She says the method is really three methods in one: the calendar method, the cash envelope method, and the paycheck method. The system can be customized to your unique budget, she says, and will help you visualize your goals. Here’s how it works.

source: nbcnews.com