In addition, Perez aimed to cut down in as many areas and adopting a zero-based budget helped her achieve this goal.

“Before you get paid, you write your take-home pay at the top of a sheet of paper, and then you spend all of that take-home pay on paper until you hit zero, so you have nothing else to spend. And that’s a good way to find areas where you’re being wasteful with money, or you can start setting limits on yourself to just squeeze a little extra out of your budget to put extra toward your debt or toward savings or whatever your goal is,” Perez said.

Furthermore, she adopted a cash envelope system and used the money specifically for its category placement.

“After I sit down every single month to see what areas I could cut or reduce a little bit more, I would tag any of those categories within my budget that I could pull out cash for. For example, if my budget for food was $400, I would go down to the bank every two weeks, pull out $200 and use that for the next two weeks until I got paid again. And that was literally the only money that I used, in these cash envelopes. That really helped me tackle my debt in a meaningful way because I wasn’t overspending.”

Perez also used the debt snowball method to aggressively pay off the lowest debt owed first while paying the minimum payments of remaining debts until the smallest debt was paid. The avalanche method was also helpful as it allowed Perez a functional way to pay off debts from the highest to the lowest interest rate.

“This is the most mathematically sound way to tackle your debt because you’re tackling the interest. So again, you pay as much money as possible to that highest interest rate debt while paying the minimum for all the others,” Perez said.

MUCH

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