I tell people we’re the cautionary tale. We were going about our lives like your average American couple in their 30’s. Decent jobs, young kids, a couple cars – one we actually owned outright so we felt a little ahead of the game – a couple credit cards and lines of credit, and a fixer-upper home that a bank allowed us to purchase. We thought we could afford all those things because creditors kept giving it to us. If we couldn’t afford it, they wouldn’t have “blessed” us with these limits, right?
We could pay our bills every month so we thought we were ok. We ignored the fact that there was NO money left over for those extravagant things. Like diapers. And diapers aren’t something you can tell a baby to hold off on buying until the next pay day. So we put diapers on a credit card. And since we’re putting it on a card anyway, might as well stock up the pantry so next month can have a little more wiggle room. But there was never any wiggling. But we were paying our bills so everything was ok.
Until it wasn’t.
My first pregnancy I had saved up 9 weeks of paid time off. We had been trying to have a baby for three years, so I was well prepared. But a week of bedrest and an emergency C-section meant I went back to work with 0 in the PTO bucket. The second pregnancy came within 3 months. It’s still one of God’s greatest jokes. So 2 pregnancies within a year, I had just enough PTO saved by the second maternity leave to pay for my insurance premiums. And that was it. I misjudged the pay cycle when I went back to work. Then work and daycare and the attacks to the immune system, I was sick. Then the kids were sick. Then the baby was in the hospital. I went from mid-January to mid-May without a full paycheck.
Oh, did I mention I was the main bread winner in the family?
My husband’s masonry business had taken off 5 years before like a cannon and we stupidly believed that was how life would be forever. Then it wasn’t. Plus a masonry company in western Nebraska with its extreme winters meant business from October through May was more miss than hit. You can’t lay brick when it’s snowing. Or freezing. Or raining. Or you might get a nice day but have to dig out and unthaw your work only to have it coated in snow overnight. Wash, rinse, repeat all winter long.
We got behind. Severely behind. At one point after the baby had just gotten out of the hospital from battling RSV at 9 weeks old, my boss called me. Her boss had called her. I was 90 days delinquent on my credit card held by the credit union I worked for. To put it bluntly, my boss’ boss had told her if I didn’t make a payment by the end of business that day, I didn’t need to come to work the next day. I had to pay a credit card payment with two lines of credit because neither one had enough available credit to use.
It was then that I had to take a good hard look at myself and ask, “How in the hell did we get here??” We had two lines of credit and four credit cards with total limits of $65,000 and we had maxed out everything.
It really hit me when a few Fridays later I got my first full paycheck and it didn’t take care of all of our problems.
I started crunching the numbers. I realized if we didn’t have any debt, we could live off of ONE of my paychecks and at the time I was making less than $15.00 an hour. I crunched the numbers again and figured we were running $2,000 in the red every month. My husband and I had a come-to-Jesus meeting that weekend and I said I was going to have to get a second job. We had to pull ourselves out of this somehow. He told me no. He said with his upcoming summer he could easily make up the difference and then some. We formulated a plan for how we were going to manage our money, manage our household, and take back our lives!
If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans.
That conversation took place on Sunday, May 17, 2015. On Monday, May 18, 2015, my husband was working on a chimney repair and as he was coming down the roof his foot caught on something and launched him off the roof, over the scaffold, and 15 feet to the ground where he landed in a belly flop. He broke his pelvis in 2 places.
That night at the emergency room we asked the doctor when he would recover. The doctor said 4-6 weeks like any other bone. We breathed a sigh of strangled relief. We would just have to white knuckle it for another month. Get an extension on all the loans (after borrowing from my parents to pay last month’s payment first), and hold on for dear life.
It wasn’t until day 3 in the hospital when the orthopedic surgeon came in and told us that my husband wouldn’t be back to work in 4-6 weeks. He would only be walking in 4-6 weeks. He wouldn’t be back to work in 4-6 months.
My world collapsed around me. Four to six months put us back into winter so it was basically an entire year of him being out of work.
I have never been so scared in all my life. I was 33 living in a house that the payment was more than I took home in a month, I had a 17 month-old, a 4 month-old and a disabled husband who couldn’t even stand long enough to make himself a sandwich. The only thing we owned to our name was my car and I was certain by fall we would be living in it.
We had a couple life insurance policies on my husband that totaled a million dollars. I laid in bed at night those first weeks wishing he had just died in that fall. I fantasized about how much better off the kids and I would be if he had. I would get myself to sleep by listing off how I would have proceeded. I would have sold the business and all the equipment. All the brick and stone and extra supplies that litter our 2 acres. Our land that we had to have because of the business. The scaffold, the forklift… ope, not the forklift, we have a loan on that for a repair last year… ok fine, the bank can have that fucker back, it needs fixed again anyway… I would sell this godforsaken house that has been more of a nightmare than the dream we thought it would be when we stupidly bought it. I wouldn’t have the time to maintain it on my own and no one to work on it to fix it up like we had planned. I would pay off our debts and probably have enough money to move to a house that was newer and smaller and something I could maintain on my own. Without debt I already knew I could cover expenses on my own…
In case you’re wondering, yes, my husband knows I felt this way. While it became a joke we said often to get through the stress (You’re worth more to me dead than alive), the weight of this truth is what has spurred us on all these years. To know that the stress of debt and the fear of it caused me to wish the love of my life and father of my children was dead has been my WHY all these years. I will NEVER be this scared again. I will NEVER feel this level of heart-crushing panic again! I will NEVER allow money to consume my thoughts, emotions, and life ever again!
By the grace of God we survived because of our amazing family, friends, and community. A fundraiser was held for us by our church and the Knights of Columbus of which my husband is a member. Enough money was donated to us that we were able to make it through the winter.
Our greatest and most lasting gift and what truly saved our lives was donated by a local pastor and his church when they gifted us enrollment in Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University.
The pastor had worked with me at the credit union for about a year before he left to be the minister at a local Methodist church. He had told me about Dave Ramsey and the DR method of getting out of debt and being financially free (emergency funds and investing). I was intrigued back then and a couple friends had gone through FPU the year before.
Once we started the classes, I was hooked. We were all in (or Gazelle Intense as Dave calls it). We knew this was life or death. It’s why gazelles run so fast. Because they know their life depends on it. I openly cried during that lesson in FPU. I still do every time I hear the rant.
We learned how to budget. I know if we hadn’t learned that one simple, but very difficult step, we would have blown through every penny of our donations by Christmas. Because we knew exactly where every penny needed to go and who needed to have it, we were able to stretch our funds all the way until summer when my husband was able to go back to work.
We debt snowballed like mo-fos for over a year! We could’ve been out of debt sooner, but the business took more downturns and we had to stop our ‘balling for a while. But because of how much we had paid off, we were able to save $800 per month from having to be paid to debtors!
Exactly four years and four months after that fateful day that turned our lives on its edge, we paid off the last of our debt (excluding the mortgage) and were able to announce to the world that WE’RE DEBT FREE!!!!
We’ve since coordinated 2 classes of our own for FPU and plan to do so every year for as long as it’s around. We’ve watched friends make their way to their own financial freedom and we’ve cheered for every one of them every baby step along the way.
May 18, 2015. The day that saved our lives. After it tried to kill us.