The One-Year Shopping Ban: How This Woman Lived On Just 51% Of Her Income

The One-Year Shopping Ban: How This Woman Lived On Just 51% Of Her Income Four years ago, Cait Flanders, a personal finance writer in Vancouver who turns 30 tomorrow, pulled out her credit cards and faced the truth she had been avoiding for years: She was $25,000 CAD ($19,800 USD) in debt, and most of it had been frittered away. Student loans accounted for $4,500 CAD ($3,600 USD), but as for the rest? “I don’t have a great answer for it. I just lived a lifestyle I couldn’t afford,” she says. She wasn’t even a big shopper, and her rent, at $1,100 CAD ($870 USD) is below average for her city. It mostly just inattention to her finances: “If my friends were going to dinner, I never wanted to say no. So even if that meant going out to dinner every day of the week, I said yes.” She started a blog, Blonde on a Budget, which now gets about 30,000 readers monthly, and after two years of scrimping — one haircut, no travel, no dining out, putting as much as 55% of her monthly income toward her debt — she was debt-free. But afterward, she relaxed her budget. Though she didn’t fall back into debt, she would only save 8% of her monthly income even when she intended to put away 20%. She did hit that goal a few times that first year out of debt, but “considering I had once been doing without up to 55% of my income, that’s somewhat underwhelming,” she says.