Jaime Tardy
Tardy, 28, whittled down $70,000 of debt in less than two years by getting on a strict budget.
Strategy: Budget!
Advice: Save, save, save before you quit your day job.
A couple years ago, I decided I wanted to have a baby and quit my job. But there was a problem. My husband and I were in debt, and I made two-thirds of our household income. So I couldn't just quit.
I started out by sitting down and adding up all our debt -- which ended up being around $70,000. The first thing I thought was, 'Wow, we really need to start getting rid of this. We should sell our car right away.'
After some prodding, my husband got on board too. We sold his car and were able to immediately get rid of $19,000 of our total debt. After that, we knew we were totally doing this.
Craigslist and eBay became our best friends, and we sold everything from a kayak to a weight bench and a computer monitor.
My husband did some website design jobs on the side to make some extra money, and we printed out a budget each month so we knew exactly how much we could spend and what we would be spending it on.
We saved on gas costs by limiting the amount of driving we did, and we put ourselves on a grocery budget of $300 a month. On top of that, we cut out cable, lowered our phone bill as much as humanly possible and switched our car insurance twice in one year to find lower rates.
By the time I quit my job for good -- which was less than two years after I started the budget -- we had paid off $70,000 in debt and put $23,000 in the bank as an emergency fund.
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Last updated October 21 2010: 12:29 PM ET
