<prompt> Human: Hey all, the mods have asked me not to share the story because of the personal information rules, but heres the backstory: You might have recognized some of my posts about budgeting before. I sought out this sub to find an audience of people I could talk to about money. After college, my mom was facing bankruptcy and I was 60k in debt. Luckily I had a job in the military and a nearly obsessive personal motivation to pay off our debts and get a good start on life. But every time I would bring up the subject of money and budgeting with my friends, I would get lambasted for being tacky. When I started having success at paying off debt, some of my closest friends acted resentful towards me, and relationships Ive had since I was a kid broke down completely. I decided to keep quiet about money and I didnt bring it up with anyone because I didnt want to risk damaging more relationships. Thankfully I eventually found this sub, started sharing my ideas with you, and finally found an outlet where I could speak my mind about budgeting and personal finance. The people here gave me great feedback and challenged me to learn more. After you responded well to a few of my posts, I was contacted for an interview for a popular credit website. She loved the personal details of my story and decided to write an article about my success. A week later, friends who I havent spoken to in years are sending me screenshots of their phone with a picture of me as the 3 national headline of the day. The article? A success story about how a young guy in his 20s paid off all his debt and his mothers debt in 3 years, along with a screenshot of the budgets I made for myself in the process. Friends on facebook started sharing the article and collecting more likes than I have friends. Relatives halfway across the country saw my picture featured on their citys local news headlines. The funny part is, the story about me featured images of my budget and plots showing how I paid off the debt, but the plots were over 2 years old. Years ago, I had originally posted everything the national article had shown on my own facebook wall to try to help my friends, but I removed it within 5 minutes after my closest friends berated me.TLDNR: This sub empowered me to open up dialogue about money after my friends shut the conversation down. Your valuable feedback helped me pay off 60,000 in debt, my moms debt, and helped my story get featured in thousands of news agencies worldwide. People are much more comfortable talking about money with me now. THANK YOU FOR THE SUPPORT!!!EDIT: Heres my latest budgeting guidline post to reddit. Once Im done with school, I intend to make even nicer spreadsheets and guidelines to share with the community. Cheers and happy budgeting!How to Build Your Budget:How to View Your Budget:Heres the excel file I built to do it personal information has been sanitized:  <response>: This is a great story for a lot of reasons, but for me it really made me very grateful that I have friends I can talk to about money. Honestly its in fairly generic terms - they dont know how much I make or exactly how much debt I was in, or am in now. But I could openly talk to them about how we couldnt do this or that because we were trying to pay off debt. I had conversations with several different friends about prioritizing debt and they thanked me for it and asked me for advice. One friend in particular was completely unaware of income based repayment plans for federal student loans. After our discussion, she got on one of those, and is applying her savings toward her much higher interest private student loans, so shell be out of debt faster and save some money. I really wish we could all be more open about these types of discussions, I think it would be helpful to everyone. 