Jasmine Taylor was heavily in debt ahead of turning thirty. The Texan from Amarillo owed $60,000 in student debts alone plus another $20,000 in credit card and medical debts. And then she discovered the age-old system of cash stuffing.
She adopted it and cleared her debts within a couple of years. Then she turned it into a buzzing business model and is well on her way to a million-dollar turnover in 2023.
Taylor, an applied science student, was then trying to get her certification in teaching. And on the sideline she was doing everything to survive, including delivery of food and prescription, online survey, couponing, transcribing, and much more.
Even as her debts kept piling up, she discovered the virtues of cash stuffing. It is an old and simple budgeting system where individuals take cash for different spending categories and then put the money separately into bottles and envelopes for each segment.
Cash stuffing ensures a tight budget for each expenditure for the month. Taylor says that as she approached thirty, she discovered that while she had a degree, she was without a job or a steady source of income. And the debts were adding up each moment while she was without a functioning budget.
Cash Stuffing: A Unique Method Of Saving An Spending
Things are turning worse for Americans as credit card debt keeps mounting. More Americans are using credit cards, a dangerous form of expending with high interest and no hope of ever getting out of this downward spiral. But Taylor adopted an unusual way to get out of the mess.
She turned budgeting into a business model by selling products that helped others adopt the Cash Stuffing method of allocating fixed amounts for various expenses.
Traditionally the method refers to the system of placing cash into labeled envelopes and junking all your credit and even debit cards. She admits that during the worst phase of her predicament, she was willing to give everything a try to get out of the mess she was in.
She spent hours on YouTube finding out ways to get out of her debts. She finally settled on the cahs stuffing method as it seems the most practical and immediate of her requirements. All she had to do was use only cash for her expenses and allocate it for various needs depending on her paycheck at the end of her month.
She also used envelopes for special saving needs like Christmas presents, birthday presents, and car maintenance that are not monthly expenditure but which needs to be budgeted when the need arises.
She says that such unusual expenses come up and then it puts an enormous expense on the budget. But it doesn’t happen if you have planned for such an eventuality.
Taylor Fully Credits Cash Stuffing Method For Her Turnaround
Taylor admits that she was committed to trying to dig herself out of the mess she was in and was willing to try out anything. She adopted the simple philosophy that when the money set aside for an expense is gone, there will be no expense in that segment for that month till the next month.
Taylor says that we have this natural urge to overspend when it comes to plastic money. This tendency to spend impulsively abruptly comes to an end when people have to spend it all through cash expenses. If the money allocated for a particular expense is exhausted, that is it for the present month.
How Cash Stuffing Is Assisting Tiktok Creators Beat Inflation
With inflation refusing to cool down, some TikTok creators are turning to cash stuffing to manage their expenses. And many are reporting generous success in doing so.
Even as gas and grocery prices remain overheated, many find their monthly bill double almost overnight. Filing up tanks costs way more than it used to. It was close to 40% at one point. And this rise in expenses was not something that Americans notice a year and a half back.
Many fell back on their credit cards and hoped to ride out what they considered a temporary wave. But this phase of sky-high prices has refused to die down even a year and a half later, even though it has eased a bit from its peak in the last three quarters of 2022.
Many Americans resorted to multiple credit cards to juggle their expenses and were running up debts in tens of thousands of dollars within months.
But many have discovered the virtue of old-fashioned cash. This helps to limit expenses to how much cash one has instead of resorting to high expenses.
The Cash Stuffing concept is not new and works like the envelope system of budgeting. Before banks and ATMs helped households plan for their monthly budget, people used to divide their income into multiple envelopes marked with each expense. It was an old concept but is quite effective in limiting the expense for a month to the income for that same month.
Even irregular expenses such as holiday expenses and tax could be budgeted that way. And with inflation overheating the market, people have to be extra careful of their regular expenses.
Gone are the days when people could go a little over the budget and still manage to save some into the next month. But it is important that you maintain fiscal discipline and still to your plans. There is always that tendency to pull some money from envelopes where there is a little saved at the end of that day.
But there has been a need to revisit the budget with prices rising at an incredible pace. There is no more the set-it-and-forget-it budget.
Cash stuffing works best for those who are into assessing their regular budgets and allocating a certain amount to them. Those who began early, as TikTok personality Shelise began early, over seven years ago. And now that things are tight, it has been easier for her to fit it into her existing routine.
She said that despite being hit from every angle conceivable, she had things under control even with Cash Stuffing. She says that limiting regular expenses to cash has given her better control over her budgeting. She is now able to prioritize expenses and spend accordingly.
