It was in early 2021 when 31-year-old Jasmine Taylor decided that she would need to make changes to how she handled her finances after she remembers not knowing how she would make it following the holiday season the year before.
“I just remember wondering how I was going to make it through the next month,” Taylor told CNBC Make It in a recent interview.
Taylor, who was getting by delivering pharmaceutical prescriptions and food for DoorDash, had recently lost her full-time job and was accruing interest on her $60,000 student loan debt and $9,000 in medical and credit card debt. So she decided she would begin researching “cash stuffing,” which she said changed her life.
“I found cash budgeting and I literally stuck to it,” she said. “I would only spend what I had in cash.”
To hold herself accountable, Taylor would begin the journey by posting on TikTok, a world where it is “mostly kids dancing,” she said. Posts of her stuffing cash in envelopes would soon go viral.
In just one year of “cash stuffing,” she paid off $23,000 in student loan debt and wiped her medical and credit card balance clean. She then decided to pursue creating content around budgeting full-time with her $1,200 stimulus check she received from the 2020 pandemic, leading her to create Baddies and Budgets, which provides courses to people interested in learning more about how to save, budget, in addition to selling paraphernalia online.
Last year, Taylor’s business brought in about $850,000, making her business well on its way to pulling in $1 million.
Part of her success, Taylor said, was to operate on a zero-based budget, which “means you start your budget with whatever your paycheck number is, and you give every dollar a place to go, down to zero,” she said. “I put aside money for bills in envelopes. I put money aside for variable expenses, which is weekly spending,” she says. “Then you also put money aside for ‘sinking funds,’ which are like little short-term or long-term savings accounts.”
Whatever was left over the entrepreneur said she would use to pay down debt or build long-term savings, adding that a large part of her success was adopting the “envelope method,” which CNBC said “has been around for decades, and was a popular way of managing household finances in the days before debit cards and online payments.”
Taylor added that “I’ve had older women reach out. They come across my content, and they’re like, ‘My grandmother used to do that!’ I looked into the envelope, and it had been sitting there for a while, and I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I haven’t needed this,'” she says. “It’s a really surreal feeling when you’re a person who has mismanaged money all their life, when you finally get to the point where it’s like, ‘OK, I can do this.'”
Even with all the success around her business, she only allocates just $1,200 per week as her salary. The rest of the money she acquires in revenue is reinvested into her business.
“The same stuff I teach my audience, I still use in my everyday life,” she concluded.
