I Cooked My Way Out Of $50K Debt!

This Frugal Mum’s Budget Busting Menu System Is Saving the Average Aussie Big Bucks

- Keeley Henderson

Faced with a mountain of crippling debt, Penina Petersen burst into tears. How would they ever pay it off ?

A business tax bill combined with credit cards and buying their car on hire purchase had left them $50k in debt.

‘We were just living it up, having fun and buying whatever we wanted. We were eating out all the time. My attitude to money was terrible. We were living week to week,’ she tells New Idea.

But the couple’s fun was cut short 15 years ago, after they crunched the numbers and saw that figure in black and white.

‘We were beside ourselves. We even considered bankruptcy because we didn’t know how to get out of that,’ Penina says.

One of the first things that had to change was the couple’s love of dining out.

‘I was like: “We are in debt. We can’t go out to eat five times a week now. I’m going to have to rein it in a lot. I’m going to start cooking at home.”’

Realising they needed to remove themselves from temptation, the young couple sold all their belongings and left Melbourne for Kambalda, a remote mining town in WA.

‘We drove through Adelaide and got married on the way. I reckon Richard didn’t want a miner to steal me,’ Penina laughs.

Within days of arriving in Kambalda they both had jobs, and for the next year they threw themselves into repaying their debts.