Hi again, Michaela.

Hello, Bola, how are you?

I'm doing great. How are you?

I'm fantastic, thank you.

Well, welcome back to the Clever Girls New Podcast. We just spoke and that episode aired a couple weeks ago, but we are splitting this recording into two so we just spoke literally a few minutes ago

Yep, but that episode was about know, getting started with budgeting, misconceptions about budgeting, how to be successful with budgeting. And this time we want to focus on how to recover from budgeting setbacks and getting back on track and you have such an awesome story to share with us,

experience to share of this because you paid off about $60,000 of debt with the help of the budget and this is tied into our very new

Claro Finance and Aaron Conjun budget planner

that launched not too long ago.

I excited to be doing the collaboration and we're going to talk more about that if you haven't caught the first episode. But please, before we dive and tell us who you are, remind us who you are and what you do. Thank you so much, Bola. So I am Michaela Vardilocous and I'm a product

manager on our product development team at Aaron Congren. And for those of you who are not familiar with our brand, we are a lifestyle brand and we we create really fun and functional organization things to help you keep your life together.

So whether that be in school at home at your office,

we are best known for our paper planners and our notebooks,

but we have a lot of amazing accessories

that couple with those as well.

Yes, and one of those amazing planners

is our clever of finance budget planner in collaboration with

Aaron condren. Like I mentioned we'll talk about that later but I would love for

you to start by sharing the setbacks you have faced when it came to your

finances I know you mentioned in our prior episode about your credit card debt but I

love for you to share how you felt emotionally about that debt and how you leveraged a budget to recover.

So in my early 20s I had just finished grad school which I also had student loan debt coupled with that credit card debt. So having just graduated from my masters, I went straight into teaching and I taught for four years and as a teacher you don't have the highest salary especially in Southern California but I was young and in my early 20s and I was young and in my early 20s and I wanted my classroom to look as beautiful as all of these teachers I saw on Instagram and Pinterest.

...