Hey! I’m Steph.

In 2012, my husband (then boyfriend) and I started paying on my student loans. Our goal was to pay them off in 5 years. It was my only debt and he, smart guy that he is, was debt free. People told us we were crazy, that “life happens,” and we’d be paying on them for 30 years just like everyone else. That only fueled our desire to get them paid off quickly and be free of payments. You can read the whole story at Our 90,000 Turnaround.

Long story short, we became debt free three and a half years later despite moving across the country, getting married, and doing minor renovations to our house, all of which were cash flowed.

I started The Simple Girl’s Guide in 2018, originally as a way to share relationship advice, but that quickly morphed into talking about how to handle money with a significant other. From there I decided to focus on making personal finance simple and explaining things to others that had taken me a while to understand.

In general, I am a simple girl leading a pretty simple life, and I want finances to be simple, too.

Currently, I’m a stay-at-home mom to my two kids who are three and a half and one and a half. Before this, I was an English teacher for eight years. After having our son in 2016, I continued to work while my husband was a stay-at-home dad. I thought I would be ok with our set up, but it turned out that I really wanted to be the stay-at-home parent. It took three years for me to feel comfortable quitting my stable job as a teacher, but I finally did it and have never been happier. The only reason we’ve been able to be a one income household for this long is because we haven’t been shackled with debt, slaves to the people we owe money to.

It’s not always easy. We budget closely. We have to say no. We’re not good at saying no. We adjust. We plan. We save.