It can become extremely taxing on our mental selves to be constantly saying to different things or people all in the name of getting out of debt. It's difficult. Even more difficult when you're not feeling as if you're making progress on your debt. Remind yourself that your debt isn't a forever thing. That your sacrifice isn't a forever thing. Once your debt is paid off, you'll be more free to do as you please with your money. 

If your company offers a 401K program, plus a match to go along with it... you should be signing up for that right now if you haven't already. Getting a match on your own 401k investment is like getting free money. Ok, maybe not free but extra money from your company. Each company sets their own terms in which they payout out the match, so check with your HR department for more details if you're curious. 

There are a lot of suggested methods out there, however, for myself personally I like to find an average of what I spend over a period of time for that specific category.  This is often a much more realistic expectation of how much I'll likely spend in this category and can therefore make a better education decision to make any adjustments to it.

While there are somethings I was able to justify spending my monthly paycheck on (Ie. Rent, Car, Gas, etc), but then... the remaining 50% of my paycheck goes unaccounted for. I couldn't tell you where it went or how fast it went or if there was something worth much value I spent my money. Until I started tracking my spending, I wasn't able to achieve any sort of savings goal or know how much extra I could put towards anything much less believe I had extra to save.

There are a lot of categories in Mint to choose from to track your spending, but I feel as if it's too specific... to narrowed, when it needs to be a bit more board and more along the lines of where we spend our money and not what we spend out money on. 

Mint was created by Intuit - the creators of Quickbooks, TurboTax, and T-Sheets. So, when it comes to linking bank accounts, I think they've got it figured out how to handle sensitive information. Furthermore, with Mint, you can't do anything with your bank other than import transactions. 

I like to create goals in Mint because it's an easy way to account for the extra money in my paycheck that isn't being used for my budget. I also like that Mint keeps track of how long it will take me to achieve my goals based on how much is in the account I've linked the goal to. I don't create Mint goals for anything outside of my base full-time job paycheck. 

I have different savings goals with very different purposes for that money. To avoid getting things intertwined with different goals, I keep money separate so that at a glance I know how much I have available to spend on travel or for an annual bill that just came due. 

Get at least $1,000 or, 1 month's salary saved. Once you have that, circle back and focus on your debt until it's gone. Being debt free, you can work on building up your emergency fund to have enough for 3 month's salary and then 6 month's salary. You never know when life will happen and having something set aside will be a lifesaver. The time to save for this is when you have a job and things are, well... going okay.

When I was looking for ways to make some extra money every month to pay towards my loans, I wasn't too keen on the idea of working a second job because I wanted a bit of a social life and flexibility. So, I started donating plasma earning a few hundred dollars a month for just a few hours of my time a week. A lot less commitment than a second job and certainly no skills required and convincing job interviews. Not to mention, you're contributing to research endeavors designed to save lives through the use of plasma.