We began our financial journey together in 2012, not long before we got married. We were living together at the time, and like many couples, we had discussions and arguments about money. I was active duty in the Air Force at the time. Sarah had moved across three states to come to live with me. She did not have a job yet. Things change quickly when suddenly one modest income is providing for two people. Like many young couples starting out, our plans and goals did not match our finances. No big deal, we thought, we just put it on credit cards, and it wasn’t a problem anymore.
Until it was. In 2014, I was injured and made an unplanned early exit from the Air Force. Sarah was working a job making slightly more than minimum wage at that time. To make matters worse, we incurred over $15,000 in debt making emergency home repairs that were not covered by our homeowner’s insurance policy. To add on to all this, our son was born just months after I left the Air Force. Like they say, “When it rains, it pours.” My leaving the Air Force was a difficult transition for us, but we did what we had to do.
At our lowest point, we had over $75,000 in consumer debt not including our mortgage. Almost $35,000 of that was in credit cards alone. We had one auto repossession and payments were 90+ days late on some loans. For a while, we were really struggling to make ends meet. I had to use my GI Bill education benefits just to have money every month to pay our bills. I worked a couple of odd jobs that didn’t last. Then, in 2016, I landed a job working 12-hour night shifts. This was hard on the family, but we needed the money. It was around this time I found Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover.
I read Ramsey’s book and it just made sense to me. I talked to Sarah about it, and we decided to give it a shot. We created our first real budget and stuck to it. Over the last three years, we have managed to put aside a small emergency fund and have paid down our debt from 10 accounts totaling over $75,000 to just three accounts totaling $25,000. We are on track to completely pay off our debt besides our mortgage by mid-2020. The further along we get in this journey, the more excited we are. It is truly like feeling a weight being lifted off our shoulders. In a future post, I will break down the ups and downs of our journey thus far and share our plans for the future.
Love you. Paul and I did Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University, love it, but with the all the troubles of Paul’s career in EMS, we still ended up with both home and auto repo on our credit report. Unfortunately in marriage, money is always going to be a problem issue. Even after 15 years together, Paul and I still have different views on how the money should be spent but we’ve become better at not letting it divide us.