One community which has been slowly gaining traction in Ireland in recent years, and accelerating more rapidly in recent months, is the growing number of debt-free divas who have been winning friends and influencing people with their honest personal finance stories and savvy budgeting advice for others.
She is not a natural saver. “I was very bad with money. I love spending and buying things, and for years I thought that spending money gave me freedom and status. I thought budgeting was for boring people; mean, frugal, penny-pinching people. I thought these people just needed to live a little.” She decided she would have to do something. She sat down and totted up all that she owed and was pleasantly surprised — if pleasantly can be used in such a context — to see that it came to €15,000. “I thought I was €25,000 in debt, so that felt like a win. Then I started to budget, and once I started it was like opening Pandora’s box.”
She says her growing number of Instagram followers were congratulating her on the little wins and the baby steps. “The positive affirmations were addictive. There were days I would think, maybe I should go for dinner and relax, and then I was like no, because people were behind me.” When her second child started school she retrained as a personal trainer. “The first year I went back to work and we were on two incomes, we enjoyed it. We took two holidays: one to America, that is where we blew a lot of money and put a lot of money on the credit card.”
One reason she believes her account resonates is that she is “living what I am talking about, we are still struggling. In many ways, people are going on a journey with us. We are everyday people who are trying to navigate a difficult situation and that appeals to people.” Her hard-core budgeting worked, although it took years. She wrote a book about her experience and self-published it. Then she realised that to promote it she would have to use Instagram. “I would have been very shy before that,” she says.“It has been hugely important and grown very fast” — she has 43,000 followers — “and I get so much feedback from people about [how] they have changed their spending.”And she only spends what is in the envelopes.