The realization of how bad I was with money was a hard one to swallow. I was humiliated by my actions and embarrassed that I had gotten us into such a mess. Once I came to grips with my spending problem and why I wanted to stop, it was much easier for me to move forward. But even though things were starting to work, I was still afraid of falling off the wagon.
After we had that long talk one evening about the debt I had racked up, I knew we needed another income. I had a friend who was the manager at a local Ruth’s Chris Steak House. I talked to him that night, and since I had previous restaurant experience, I got a job as a server there. For the next year and a half I worked five or six nights per week from around 3 p.m. until midnight. I would come home to a dark house, slip into bed, and then wake up at 6 a.m. to take care of my son while Mark rushed off to work. I made great money, which helped us start to pay off some of our debts. Having the extra income didn’t help solve the spending problem I had, though. I would still find ways to spend extra cash. We would spend money on larger items, like a $4,000 fence for our backyard, or a swing set for our son. We were still in loads of debt, but we were making some progress. Despite the progress, I was having a really hard time and missed seeing my son every night. I wasn’t able to put him to bed for almost a year and a half, and that made me so sad! I missed knowing what he liked to eat for dinner, and what his favorite bedtime story was. As much as I knew that this sacrifice was only for the short term, it was painful for me to say goodbye to him every day knowing how much he would miss me.
After I had worked a year and a half at the restaurant, Mark and I had paid down enough debt to have a different kind of conversation. We talked about my quitting my job to stay home with Andrew. I was exhausted working late nights in a stressful restaurant environment and just wanted to be home with my family. There were only three of us at that time, and we wanted to live a different kind of lifestyle. Mark and I worked opposite shifts and we missed each other. He worked from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and I worked from 3:00 p.m. to midnight. We had my sister-in-law watch Andrew from 2:30 to 4:30 every afternoon, and it was getting to be a hassle. We were always working. We took a look at our budget again and realized we were spending more than $1,000 per month on food. We ate out a lot, and spent a lot on groceries that would eventually spoil in our refrigerator from going uneaten. We figured that if I could cut our grocery bill down to only $200 per month and not go out to eat, we could afford for me to quit my job. We would still have debt payments to make, but we could continue to pay them off little by little, and I could be at home with my son. It seemed like that was a better choice for our family.
This is where our story begins to take another turn, because I was now presented with a new challenge—to cut our grocery bill from $1,000 to $200 per month. That meant we only had $50 per week to eat, and I had to make it work or else I was back to waiting tables. I Googled how to use coupons one night and a whole new world opened up to me. It was a game that I desperately wanted to master, so I set out to learn a new skill.
I learned how to coupon like a pro, mastering how to match coupons with sale items at Target, shop for larger items at BJ’s to save money, and work the rebate programs at drugstores like Rite Aid, Walgreens, and CVS. I successfully fed our family on $50 per week for two years. I learned how to get toiletries, diapers, and food for almost free every single week. I was so excited about this that I taught my friends Colleen and Lindsay how to do it too, and we would frequently wake up at 5 a.m. to go to a triple coupon sale before our husbands went to work. We would shop together with hundreds of coupons in hand, looking to get hundreds of dollars of food for under $50. It was becoming my new addiction of a sort, but it was something that I felt good about. I was saving money, so that the money we had could go toward paying down the debt that I had incurred. It was my way to give back and contribute financially to my family.
I started posting pictures of my amazing grocery shopping trips on Facebook and on a tiny Blogspot blog I started. My friends were so amazed at my shopping trips, where I would carefully plan out how to get $400 in groceries for only $45, that they started asking me how I was doing it. I would have friends over in the evenings, and over coffee we would chat about how to use coupons. I would take friends out shopping at the grocery store and show them the ropes. I remember one night taking a young dating couple to the grocery store, showing them what they could buy for free and watching their faces light up at the checkout counter when they saw how much more they could get for their money.
I loved having this new expertise that others wanted to learn. The local moms’ group I was a part of asked me if I could teach a coupon class for the group one night, and of course I said yes!
My first coupon class was for ten women in my moms’ group. We sat in my living room and I shared my tips and tricks with them, showed them my massive three-inch coupon binder, which contained hundreds of coupons in baseball card organizers. Soon many of them started having success and were able to financially contribute to their families as well.
I taught about a half dozen free coupon classes throughout the year, mostly to church groups and friends and family. I loved sharing my secrets, but most of all it really helped me feel I was helping others. We were able to pay down a bit of debt that year because of the huge savings we had freed up in our budget, and suddenly I started seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. I was changing in so many ways. That giant mountain of debt I could never see over started shrinking and I could see the sun climbing over the top of the mountain. I was able to stick to a budget for the first time in my life, and I was actually enjoying it!
During this year, I also got pregnant with my second child. I was so sick during this pregnancy that I didn’t coupon for most of the time. Thankfully I was still able to keep our grocery budget to around $75 per week because of the massive stockpile I had collected the year before. I had stocked up on so much free pasta, peanut butter, shampoo, conditioner, and razors that we practically didn’t have to buy toiletries for the entire year. We ended up eating out a lot because I was so tired and sick during the pregnancy, so we stopped making extra debt payments, but we were careful to not incur any more debt. I was a changed woman. I wasn’t spending money, I had stopped impulsively buying, and I respected the boundaries that we had put in place with our budget.
Right after the birth of my second child, we received word that Mark’s job was in jeopardy. His company had merged with another one and they were going to be doing layoffs. He was the last one who was hired, so he was the first on the chopping block. I remember exactly where we were sitting when we got the call. We had just finished registering our son for pre-K and we were walking around our favorite pond in the woods near our neighborhood. We had our five-day-old baby nestled in a baby carrier on my chest, and our four-year-old running around like boys do. Mark received the call, and our world crashed around us. During the next six weeks we would learn that we would have to move back to New York from South Carolina, where we were living. Mark got offered his old job back in New York, so we moved back home into his parents’ basement. We had been on our way to a debt-free life, and in a moment all of our plans, our hard work, our successes came falling down around us.
Six weeks later we moved back to our home state of New York. We sold as a short sale the 3,200-square-foot home that was killing us. We were able to get approved for a short sale due to Mark’s job insecurity, and because ten homes on our street were about to go into foreclosure. When we sold our house for $190,000 to a cash buyer, it was a true miracle! The stress of selling a huge house while having a newborn baby proved to be taxing but not impossible. We were finally going to be free from the stress of that huge mortgage payment and well on our way to paying down more debt.
We had to go into $4,000 more debt to move; we didn’t have any other option. Mark’s parents let us borrow this sum with terms that we would pay it back as soon as possible and with interest. Three years to the day after moving to South Carolina, we drove back to New York with all of our belongings in a moving truck behind us, just like we had three years earlier. We had one more child and less debt, and were free from many of the terrible financial mistakes we had made over those past three years. I felt as if we had been given a second chance at life.
When we first moved back to New York, we were homeless. We lived with Mark’s parents for a week, and then moved into my sister’s house for a few weeks. She was pregnant with her first child, and we only had about three or four weeks to stay with her until she was due with her baby.
We debated owning versus renting a house, but because we had just done a short sale on our property, we couldn’t qualify for another mortgage right away. We opted to rent, and went searching for something that was large enough for our family of four.
We found a rental town house and nestled into the 800-square-foot home. We sold most of what we owned for cash to help pay down debt, except for a few beds and a single couch. The house was so small that we didn’t have room for our kitchen supplies, so we kept them in shelves out in the garage. Despite the tight quarters, we were happy. We were finally free of the big house that had been a struggle to afford and were back near our family again. I missed my old friends in South Carolina terribly, but I knew this was the best decision for our family.
In the months after we moved back, I learned that couponing was not as easy in New York as it had been in South Carolina. I had to learn all new store policies, and with the lack of a local blogger providing all of the sale matchups, I was feeling the stress of an increasing grocery budget. But within five months I was back down to my $50-per-week budget and getting my friends to play along too. I started to post more and more pictures on Facebook of how I got free stuff using coupons. My friends wanted to know more!
With so many people wanting me to teach them, I decided to start a coupon class. I had done at least twelve of them back in South Carolina, teaching hundreds of people how to cut their grocery bills successfully, so I felt it was the right time to start charging for the class. I thought that maybe if I charged, I could make a little extra cash for my time and earn back my investment for the packets I printed out for the class. I also knew that if people pay for something they are more likely to show up—I was sick of people standing me up for classes when I had already paid to have the printouts made for them.
My first coupon class in New York had thirty people in attendance. I charged $10 per person and made $300 cash that night. I was thrilled, but I didn’t know what to do with the money. I wondered if we should pay down more debt, or if I should invest it back into my coupon class in some way. Everyone at the class kept asking if I would start a website to help them on a weekly basis, but I wasn’t sure if that was what I wanted to do.
After reading a few blogs online, I knew that somehow people were making money by blogging, even though I had no idea how. At that time, we really needed the extra income since we wanted to send our son to preschool that year. In May 2010, as I stood at my kitchen sink washing dinner dishes, I asked myself, “What would I call a website? I mean, I am just that lady you get stuck behind in the grocery store, right?”
There it was! Like a lightbulb turning on over my head, I repeated to myself, “I am THAT Lady.” That was what I would call my website! I rushed over to my computer and searched to see if the domain name was taken, and it wasn’t! I was thrilled, and that night I purchased the website name I am THAT Lady, which is now laurengreutman.com. I had no idea what this would mean, but I knew that it was another way for me to help others, and maybe earn a little extra money on the side to help pay for my son’s preschool while continuing to pay down our debt.
I continued to teach coupon classes and had graduated to hosting them at local newspaper offices per their request. Suddenly I started receiving requests to appear on our local news stations. It was such a thrill as I started to get more and more readers visiting my website. What excited me the most was that so many of these people were women facing similar struggles to mine about getting out of debt, paying their bills, and having enough to feed their family healthy food.
I put in forty hours per week on my little website that I had my brother-in-law design using the $300 from that first coupon class. I still had no idea how to make money blogging, but I worked hard to create something that I knew would help other women save on their groceries. An entire year had passed and I had finally learned how to make money doing what I loved and was good at. At first I was earning around $200 each month on the blog, getting paid from companies to get people to print coupons from my website, as well as money I made from private advertising. It equaled about $1.25 per hour considering the amount of time I was putting into it each week. Some may say it was a waste of time (and I had friends and family who did), but that $200 per month was huge for us! That meant that we could afford to send our son to the private Christian preschool we wanted him to attend, and have some extra cash to pay down more debt.
I was also pregnant with our third child, and knew that our expenses would increase with the welcome addition. We started planning ahead. During my pregnancy I learned how to bring in even more money. I started taking home surveys and using Swagbucks to earn extra cash, participating in market research, selling things on eBay, and learning how to increase my earnings through the blog. With the appearances on my local news stations, more people started to visit the blog, which meant I was getting paid more from advertisers. I also started to learn how to do affiliate marketing and started earning a percentage of every purchase someone would make through one of my links. For example, if there was a sale on toilet paper on Amazon, I would post the deal on my website with an affiliate link (provided to me by Amazon) and earn a small percentage of the sale. Those small percentages add up when multiple people purchase, so I started to learn how to do more and more affiliate posts. When my third child was born, everything started to change with the website. The reality television show Extreme Couponing had become popular on TLC. All of a sudden young people were starting to come out in droves to my coupon seminars. They wanted to learn more, so they would read my blog and share it with their friends. My website income started to grow and we were able to pay off more and more debt. It was such an exciting time, because I finally felt I was making a substantial contribution to our family finances.
I continued to write for I am THAT Lady (now laurengreutman.com) and teach live coupon seminars for the next few years. As a spending addict now in recovery, I was so excited to share with everyone what I had learned through the process. I knew the exact changes I had made that really made a difference, and I was having a lot of success using my life experiences to teach others how to do the same thing. I had come full circle and now found pleasure in helping others get through the rough terrain that I had been through a few years before.
Mark got a raise at work that year as well, accelerating our debt repayment even more. We found out we were pregnant with baby number four, and our credit cards started to disappear one at a time, until we finally paid them all off. Finally, after all our hard work, we wrote the last check to our student loan company in February 2012. This was the final debt repayment. It was official! We had paid off more than $40,000 worth of car payments, credit card bills, and student loans in just under four years!
It was not an easy journey, but here I am six years after starting that website writing this book for you. I’ve been through a lot, from a chronic spending addiction to recovery to teaching, and am now valued as an expert who has literally helped millions of women along the way. I’ve been featured on shows like The Dr. Oz Show, Good Morning America, Fox & Friends, and the Today show. They keep asking me to come back on their shows, because my story resonates with so many and this is an issue that affects millions.
A 2015 study by NerdWallet reported that the average American household credit card debt is more than $15,000, with national consumer debt at $712 billion! Those are huge numbers, and I know firsthand what it’s like to be one of those consumers drowning in debt. I’ve been there, I know what to do, and I know how to get out. It’s not just about increasing your income or decreasing your bills, even though those are all things I teach. It’s really about the vision, emotions, and values behind what you are doing with your money.
In the past few years, I’ve had the pleasure of sitting down with and helping many people who need help with their finances. I’ve realized that people can do anything they put their minds to if they want it bad enough. I wanted to get out of debt and change my life so badly that I literally changed everything—from my mind-set, to where I lived, to how I spent and viewed money. I want that for you, too. You may not become a nationally known money expert like me, but you can become a money expert for yourself and your family.