Welcome to the Living That Debt Free Life 2019 Personal Finance Challenge!

If you are new to budgeting, paying off debt, and managing your finances, you’ve come to the right place! I’ve compiled 12 monthly challenges to get your 2019 financially on track.

Each monthly challenge contains one of the many steps I’ve taken to help me pay off debt faster.

If you’ve been paying off debt for a while, the information in these challenges is probably nothing new to you.

But, if you’re one of the hundreds who ask me each month how I’ve managed to pay off so much debt, then this is going to be so helpful to you!

The challenge is completely free to join! Each month, we’ll complete the challenge together and chat about it here on the blog in the comments down below and on Instagram.

I’ll announce each monthly challenge here on the blog and on my Instagram Page.

If you are participating, please feel free to leave a comment down below and let me know how it’s going! And, be sure to tag your challenge-related IG photos with #TDFL2019Challenge, so I can find you and cheer you on!!

For all the monthly challenges, click HERE.

Prior Monthly Challenges

If you have done the rest of these monthly challenges, then you have tracked your expenses, made a zero-based budget, and eliminated one recurring expense from your budget. You’ve also tried using cash envelopes to keep yourself in budget going 15 days out of the month without spending and reducing your eating out budget.

If you haven’t done the previous month’s challenges, that’s ok. You can complete these challenges at any time. If you want to, complete the January, February, March, April, May and June challenges first, before forging ahead to July.

Ready to get started? Here’s this month’s challenge!

July 2019 - Set Your Year-End Financial Goals

This month’s challenge is to set your financial goals for the end of the year.

We’ve got six months left until the end of the year, and that’s PLENTY of time to make significant progress on your financial goals. But, before you can make progress on your goals, you’ve got to set some!

Step One - Write it Down

For this month’s challenge, sit down and think about what you want to accomplish by the end of the year. Depending on what stage you are in, think about what you want to accomplish in terms of savings, investing, or debt pay off.

You may want to get a certain debt paid off, you may want to send at least $6,000 more to debt before the year is over, you may want to max out your Roth IRA, you may want to hit 50% of your Baby Step 3 fully funded emergency fund. Whatever you want to do, write it down.

Make sure your goals are SMART. See this graphic from my good friend over at Balanced Boston Budget for details on setting SMART goals.

You may have lots you want to accomplish by the end of the year, and that’s fine. For me, I have a singular goal, and that’s to completely pay off all of my non-mortgage debt. So let’s use my goal as an example.

Step 2 - Break it Down

Now that you have your goals, you have to break them down to accomplish them. Breaking down your goals gives you a step-by-step plan to make sure you’ll accomplish them on time.

As of this writing, I have $14,395 left in debt to pay. And, I have 6 months left to pay it.

So, let’s divide $14,395 by 6. That equals roughly $2,400/month (not even counting interest) that I’ll have to send to my debt each month from now until the end of the year to meet my goal on time.

If we want to, we can break the goal down even further, by payday. I get paid twice a month, so that means to reach my goal, I need to be setting aside $1,200/payday to send to this debt.

What do you need to do each month to reach your goal? Write it down!

Step Three - Go All In

Maybe you’ve heard the saying “6 months from now you can be in a completely different place mentally, spiritually, or financially. Keep working and believing in yourself.” I love that quote so much, because I know it’s 100% true.

Let me tell you where I was six months ago from today.

The new year had just begun. I had been working Dave Ramsey’s plan for TWO FULL YEARS. And I had $48,303 in debt, paying $226/month in interest on that debt. Today, my total debt is $14,395 and my monthly interest on that debt has gone down to $67. Tens of thousands of dollars in debt gone ($33,908 to be exact) in only 6 months’ time. $159 in monthly interest I don’t have to pay anymore (that’s less than 1/3 of what I was paying before).

When I began this journey, I didn’t think debt freedom was possible for me. I felt overwhelmed by the amount of debt I had and I equated taking many years to get out of debt with never being able to do it. But I can tell you one thing, I was going to go all in. I wanted to see what I could do if I really went balls to the wall, all in, crazy intense.

And let me tell you, a lot can happen when you go all in.

Don’t underestimate what YOU can do in six months with some focus, intention, consistency, and hustle, when you say no to the excuses, when you finally decide to go all in.

I can’t wait for you guys to tackle this month’s challenge. But more importantly, I can’t wait until the end of the year, for you guys to tell me what you’ve been able to tackle in these 6 months. Together, we’ve got this.

Final Words

Don’t forget to tag your social media photos with #TDFL2019Challenge!! I want to encourage you and cheer you on this month! I want to see those goals you’ve set!

Then meet me back here next month for August’s challenge! Good luck, everyone!! You’ve got this!! Can’t wait to see what goals you set for yourself!!

Oh! And, as always for bonus points, complete January’s Challenge and February’s Challenge, again this month, in connection with July’s challenge. That’s what I’m going to do!