Last time I gave a little background history on our families financial issues. We began our married life with zero debt but quickly spiraled down hill.
I really think our problems began when we totally lacked a good knowledge as to how much money we were bringing in. We paid our bills on time, we bought groceries, we bought clothes when we needed them. The only problem was that we didn't pay any attention to how much we spent on each of those things. So at the end of the month we had no idea where our money went. We continued on that path for about 5 years!!
In that 5 year period, my husband was working part time jobs in between looking for a full time job, we had a second child and bought a house. Once my husband found a good job and had been then about 2 years and shortly after our second child was born, we made the decision for me to stay home full time. It was where my heart was and my job was drastically draining on me! Here is where another problem came in, we still spent money like I was working.
We finally hit rock bottom in the summer of 2010, we had recently found out I was expecting our third child. We knew we had a great deal of debt but had been working to pay that off, and we didn't want to wait until the debt was paid off to "finish" our family. Well that pregnancy ended with a miscarriage. A few weeks later we began getting the medical bills for that miscarriage, and we began to realize that we had no money to pay these bills! We were anticipating insurance to cover a pregnancy but in the end most of the bills for our miscarriage were not covered!
My husband got paid on a Friday and by that Sunday we literally had $27 in our bank account! That was after paying bills and buying groceries. That $27 was to last us another 2 weeks until we got paid again, when the same thing would probably happen! At this point we began talking and realizing that we need to get some help! Our adult Sunday school teacher at the time was a very good business man and we contacted him to see if he knew anyone that could offer to give us some financial counseling. He said he knew some people but that he would be willing to meet with us and help us out.
We began meeting with him every few weeks at first, he really helped us dig into our budget and figure out where we were going wrong. His first step was to find extra money that we could begin to snowball our debt. We had a 5 year getting out of debt plan. We met with him for about 6 months and in that six month time we were able to establish a working budget and begin to snow ball that debt!
Now lets talk about our present day situation! We met our goal!! It took some creativeness on our part and we were gifted some money along the way. Now we are debt free except for our home! It is so freeing to not have to worry about every single penny! And let me tell you there were many, many times in Wal-Mart that I had tears!! Our budget was so tight that I literally had to calculate every single item, and at the end of my trip sometimes things had to be put back! Hard decisions had to be made, do I buy another pound of beef or buy the cheaper bag of pasta instead??!
Next time I will share some of our budgeting tips and how we managed to get that debt down!
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