Mở đầu: Chúng tôi biết (nhưng không quen) Kelsey Folmar vì cô này làm cùng sở. Khi được biết là cô này ăn chay, cô sống kiểu tri túc (minimalist), và cô viết blog để quảng bá lối sống tri túc, chúng tôi mới tìm trong mạng để xem cuộc đời của cô này có thêm những gì đặc biệt, và chúng tôi tìm ra 2 bài dưới đây. Chúng tôi cảm thấy ấn tượng đẹp khi cô viết: "Sau khi ăn chay được 9 tháng, tôi như trở thành người có thể làm bất cứ việc gì." Ở sở, cô này nhanh nhẹn, hoạt bát, gọn gàng, và cô chia xẻ với mọi người là cô ăn chay và sống kiểu tri túc, đơn giản. Cô này là người Mỹ thứ 2 ăn chay mà chúng tôi biết. Cả hai đều có thân hình vừa vặn, nhanh nhẹn, khỏe mạnh, hoạt bát, bặt thiệp, và rộng rãi. Hy vọng là những chuyện tương tự như vậy sẽ giúp một số người Việt gạt bỏ đi quan niệm sai lầm là ăn chay không có đủ chất bổ, không cung cấp đủ năng lực để sinh hoạt trong cuộc sống đầy bận rộn ở Mỹ.

In February 2012, Kelsey Folmar became a vegan.

"After nine months, I was like, 'I can do anything!'" the 27-year-old Texan remembers.

After tackling one major project, she turned her attention to the next: her husband's student loan debt.

Folmar and her husband Kendan were high school sweethearts who were married in 2010. "I knew he had student debt, but I wasn't really tracking it because I wasn't married to him," she explains.

The day before her wedding, she joked that she couldn't wait to marry into $16,000 worth of debt. "I made that joke, and six or eight months later, I got a letter from his school and we logged online — and realized it was actually $24,000," she recalls. "That night I'm pretty sure we both cried."

They started hacking away at the balance after he graduated in 2011.

Although money was always tight while they lived in Austin, they made their debts a priority even while each of them earned no more than $13 an hour working for an online education website and a water-testing laboratory.

By the time Folmar turned her full attention to the debt in 2012, the grand total was about $17,000.

After watching a TED Talk by Adam Baker called "Sell Your Crap, Pay Off Your Debt" and his documentary "I'm Fine, Thanks," about Americans living in debt, Folmar signed up for Mint.com, an online budgeting tool she'd heard about from a friend.

"By the end of the night, I had all of my accounts set up," she says. "I was already starting to see where we were screwing up. I asked Kendan: 'How much money do you think we spent on food last month? $500? $600?' It was $1,200!"

After a few months of making their minimum payments of about $184 a month, Folmar used a tool to figure out how long her current payments would take to eliminate her debt — and realized that it would take a decade. "Some people are fine to do that and that's good for them, but I didn't want that burden for 10 years," she explains. "I had other goals."

So they started paying $300 a month, and realized they didn't feel much of a pinch. "We started talking about every purchase we made," she says. "Even today, two and a half years later, we still talk about anything over $30 other than groceries. Any fun item needs to be discussed. I know it sounds insane, but it worked really well."

The month after that, they bumped the payments up to $500. Then $1,000. Then $1,200, even though Kendan was still earning $12 an hour.

At first, they paid the loans equally, but transitioned into Dave Ramsey's snowball method, which eliminates the smallest debt first and works up from there. As they started making progress, Folmar began to track their journey on her blog, The Little Red Journal.

In 2013, after a year of diligent payments, they picked up and moved home to the Houston area, where Kendan was able to find a job as a chemist in the oil and gas industry paying nearly double his previous salary, and Folmar found work as a copywriter in the same industry making $28 an hour. They were able to rent Kendan's cousin's spare bedroom for $400 a month and put $2,700 a month to their loans.

"In April 2014, I set a goal that by the time I'm 27, I want to have those loans paid off," shares Folmar. "I turned 27 on April 18, and we made the last payment on the 10th." They had paid the bulk of their debt in less than 18 months.

That June, they found out that they were expecting a baby, and set the goal to save $16,000 by November to buy their own home. They were in their own place that December, and are expecting their daughter in February.

"The other day I was on Mint and said to Kendan, 'You pulled $40 out of the ATM?,' then realized it was a year ago," Folmar says. 'That's the kind of banter we have now. That's the only way we've managed to pay this debt off."

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How we got out of debt and purchased our first home. 20141212

I never thought I’d be days away from becoming a homeowner just one year after our move out of Austin, Texas. Last November, we decided to move to Houston, Texas in hopes of better jobs with higher salaries. We had struggled for years, yet always somehow managed to stay above the water in the financial sea that we found ourselves drifting in.

Below is my story on how my husband and I paid off over $19,000 of debt in less than 18 months, and saved-up to purchase our first home with the help of Mint.

Debt free and setting new goals
With the help of our new salaries, we paid off my husband’s student loans ($19,000 in 18 months) in April of this year and I was then able to set my eyes on yet another goal: saving up for a house. I had no idea how much it would actually cost to buy our first home, but with the help of Mint, we started saving within a week or two of paying down the student debt. I took the payments I was making on the student loans and instead sent them directly to the savings account, upwards of $1,500 a month!

Living frugally and new additions
We had been living with my husband’s cousin since moving to Houston and we were paying him rent for a room in his three-bedroom home, saving hundreds each month in rent alone. As we continued to live frugally and save what we could afford, we began to discuss the possibility of expanding our family. I knew it wasn’t the ideal time (where would we even put the baby?!), but we announced over the summer that we’d be expecting our first child, due in February 2015.

Serious savings
That’s when things started to get real. I soon became obsessed with saving, slashing our budgets even further to accommodate the growing savings account upwards of $2,700 a month. Every purchase was up for discussion between my husband and I. We now had a true deadline that even nature would not allow us to miss. I called our realtor and mortgage lender to find out just how much we’d need to save to purchase a home, and was shocked to find out it was nearly $15,000 for the price range we were looking in.

The light at the end of the tunnel
Our pennies were pinched even further and we continued to save, as I knew we had to move out by the end of December to allow us time to unpack the towers of boxes stacked in my parent’s garage and “nest” before the baby arrived in February. Following my strict guidelines I had created for how we handled our money, we continued to stay the course and adjust budgets as necessary. By mid-November, we had reached our goal and then some. We saved $16,000 to purchase our first home in seven months, which would cover closing costs and the down payment. We had cut it so close, but we did it!

Time to make memories
During the first day of house hunting, and the seventh home we viewed, we put in an offer on a 1,650 square foot home (perfect for our minimalist lifestyle) and short commutes to our jobs. We can’t wait to make our new house a home for our baby, Eleanor Jane, to grow up and make memories in.

I credit my success to a lot of self-discipline as well as technology like Mint. So if you’re feeling the burden of student loans or other bills like I was, I would encourage you to sign-up for Mint, and get on the path to living a debt-free life. It’s truly life-changing.