About Us

We haven’t always been budget obsessed. For many years we were simply budget challenged. We had a low income and almost no credit. We moved to Texas from North Carolina when my husband received a job offer for Compaq. We hadn’t ever considered living in Texas before and had no relatives in the area, but we were pleasantly surprised to find that Houston had a low cost of living and we’d be able to live in a good neighborhood with good schools for our kids. This was important because we were raising 4 children in a blended family with no child support from our exes.

We clipped coupons and ate a lot of ramen, hamburger helper, and casseroles. Our idea of planning for the future was making out next week’s grocery list or being creative with the bill payments so we could manage to pull off Christmas without getting any utilities turned off in the process. We never attained an emergency savings of one week’s pay, let alone 3 months.

When we finally managed to get a few credit cards, we went through them like they were found money. Although we looked responsible on the outside – our children were fed and clothed, we drove the speed limit, and we paid taxes – we were very irresponsible with our bills and debt. After maxing a credit card, we simply let it close and sit on our credit report for years.

Fast forward to 2018 after raising our children, getting laid off in 2008, foreclosing on our home, moving to a much smaller and barely habitable house in a rural area, racking up student and parent student loans, deferring those loans for 12 months at a time when eligible, starting a business, taking out loans for the business, and then closing the business years later, we found ourselves deep in debt. Very deep. Scientists have sent Styrofoam cups to the depths of the ocean to display how pressure increases with depth. When they bring the cups back to the surface, they are dramatically smaller in size. This is analogous to how deep in debt we were and how much pressure we felt because of it.

Although starting our own business helped bring in an income and kept us on our feet for years, we never made enough to actually get ahead. In fact, with the extra business credit we took out and extra taxes, we were getting further and further in debt. After my husband had a stroke in 2018, we felt a more immediate need to close our business. We both started actively searching for full time salaried employment in 2018, which isn’t easy to do in a rural area, but by 2019 we had both found good jobs that would help us get out of debt.

Here’s what our debt looked like in 2019 and what it looked like just over a year later in October 2020:

We had help paying this amount. In 2020 my husband inherited $59,200, which we used 100% on debt, so from the amount shown as paid above, $45,379 was the amount we were able to pay without the inheritance.

I wish I could say that we had been able to tackle our debt with very little income coming in. That would probably be the most helpful resource for others. We’re not those people. The lower our income, the higher our debt increased. However, once we were finally at an income where we could breathe, pay our regular bills and expenses, and still have a balance at the end of the month, we chose to start paying off debt instead of spending the extra income on other things. This is when we became truly budget obsessed and this is the journey we can share.

August 2021 Update:

I’ve included updated debt amounts below. We purchased our new home this year in March, but I haven’t include this debt in the updated table below. I will include it in an upcoming blog article about calculating net worth. We purchased the house for $259,000, so our total debt has technically increased by this amount. However, our new home is currently worth more than $20,000 this amount, so we feel comfortable with this.

Foreclosing on a home in 2009 that was upside down, and also paying off a home in 2020 that was also upside down makes us aware that nothing is guaranteed. House prices can drop. They can also go back up. Had we been able to keep making payments on our home in 2009, we would have been able to get a great profit out of it. I saw that it recently sold in 2020 for almost $100,000 more than we owed on it at that time. Some lessons are more expensive than others, but I have learned that if we’re ever in the situation again we will do everything in our power to hold onto our home.