Life and Financial History Part 2

Hello, again! If you missed the first part of this story, you can read it here.

We turned in our 30 day notice on our rental, my husband put in his 2 week notice at his job, and we began packing. My husband had acquired an old pickup bed that had been turned into a small trailer (ugly as all get out but functional) and we packed everything we owned onto the back of our pickup and little trailer. We set off with our 10 month old daughter into the unknown. We had no idea what lay ahead of us but we were excited! It was January of 2012. We had found a tiny one room cabin for rent through the town newspaper online and had rented it over the phone, sight unseen. I talked about finding it in this post. We stayed in that one room cabin for a few months until we found an apartment to rent in a 4-plex. My husband started out at $20/hr and he got plenty of overtime. For the first time in our lives we had extra money. I remember going into the tiny grocery store in our little town and for the first time buying everything we needed instead of putting some of the "lesser" needs back because there wasn't enough money to get everything. I remember coming home and crying with relief. I finally felt like I could cover all the necessities for our family without worrying that we wouldn't be able to pay a bill.

Life was good! We fell in love with this little town we had moved to. My husband was making good money. There finally seemed to be a future to work towards, not just surviving each month. We met amazing people and found a wonderful little church (the same one we are attending now again!) and just felt like we were thriving for the first time. We loved the small town vibe and the western feel of the area. We connected with people like I'd never connected with people before. It was the first place that I truly felt at home and like I fully belonged since we had gotten married. It was our place. But this weird thing kept happening! We still seemed to never have much money even though we were making more than we ever had! We still had no idea how to handle money so having more of it didn't help that much because we didn't know what to do with it. It was the most confusing thing to us! We had no idea where it all seemed to be going! Little did we realize how things were adding up. We had both gotten smartphones on a payment plan (we didn't even know that was a thing! Buy now, pay later? Sounds great, or so we thought!) and a data plan for the first time. Our cell phone bill was $180/mo. We had a home phone and internet, too. That was $150. We bought a second vehicle, also on payments. Our combined vehicle payments were $700/mo and our insurance was over $200/mo. Our rent was $500/mo and our electric ran $150/$175. We bought a table and chairs from a local furniture store, also on payments. We were so elated with life! We were finally able to have nice things, have 2 vehicles for the first time, go out to eat and do all the "normal" things for the first time! We felt that we were really coming up in the world and it was exhilarating. We had no idea we were just digging ourselves deeper and deeper and were not actually "getting ahead" like we thought we were. I so enjoyed going out to eat and had no clue how much that added up. We were still just living paycheck to paycheck even though we were making much more money than we had before.

My husband's job was incredibly stressful, even though it was really good pay. During that year, he was promoted to location manager and salaried at $62,000/yr. All of a sudden we went from $13/hr to more than we could have fathomed making! After being there a year, he got a job at another grain elevator an hour and a half away. It was on a Native American reservation, the same place we moved back to last May. It was January 2013 when we packed up and moved. We took a pay cut to move there but it was a much better job with health insurance (the first time in our marriage we had it) and a good retirement plan. They had a good reputation in the area and they turned out to be a great company to work for. It was heartbreaking for me to move from this little town I had fallen in love with and from the wonderful community we had found. I did not want to move at all but we knew it was the right door to walk through. After we moved, I realized we were in trouble. We knew we were taking a pay cut but I had not sat down to figure out what we would be making and what we had going out each month. I had no idea how much it cost us to live. We just paid bills when they came in and lived on the rest. I realized we had to do something different. Where had all that money gone over the last year?! We had nothing to show for it. The breaking point came when we found out that the former company we had worked for screwed up our withholdings and we ended up owing the IRS when we filed our taxes that year. It was $1300. We didn't have $1300. I didn't know how we would get it. It might have been $10,000 to me. It seemed insurmountable. Add to that all the extra expenses of moving and deposits and I knew we were underwater bad and needed help. We were making $50,000/yr at this new job, but we started paying for health insurance for the first time, started contributing to our 401K, and then with all the debt we had acquired over the last year, we were not doing well financially. When we lived in ID and WA, I had thought that it was because we didn't make enough money. Now, I knew that excuse wouldn't fly. I had to face the facts, we didn't know how to handle money.

That was a hard realization to come to. Both of us were raised by frugal parents, and we prided ourselves in working hard and being honest and meeting our financial obligations. We weren't frivolous and we really didn't have much to show for all that hard work except two vehicles and a nice table that we owed money on. We were mature and hard workers. It was humbling to have to admit that we didn't know how to handle our finances. One day after we had found out we owed taxes, I asked a friend of mine who was always talking about budgeting if she would help us. I knew they made $1,800/ mo and they owned their own house, lived on one income, had a child the same age as ours, and were always doing things that I would never dream of doing because I didn't think we had the money. They obviously were better off than we were even though we made more money than them. I couldn't figure out how in the world she did it! She told me that she would put me in touch with a financial coach she knew. I remember trembling as I dialed that number and spoke to a total stranger for the first time. I was so embarrassed that we were in this mess and that I had to admit that we didn't know what we were doing. I was ashamed because I felt like somehow I should know better. I felt like I was totally failing at being an adult. We worked hard, we made decent money, why weren't we getting ahead?!

I was raw and honest with our financial coach about every single cent of our financial situation. I was so scared. I thought she would be judgmental or tell me how stupid we had handled our finances even though I didn't know what to do differently. I knew I didn't know what I was doing but somehow I felt like I should know. She was so sweet. Not a hint of condemnation or judgement. She prayed with me over the phone and we set to work. I have never felt so liberated in my life! We had a plan and purpose with our finances and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel! We saved our first $1,000 (the first time we had ever had any savings to speak of) and we paid our tax bill. Then we began tackling our other debts. We paid off our table and a personal loan we had. We sold one of our vehicles and paid off that debt. We started looking for ways to reduce our living expenses. I shopped with a list and calculator at the grocery store and I knew exactly what everything cost us. Budgeting and numbers became so exciting to me and I loved watching us make progress! For the first time our money didn't just come in and go right back out, but it was actually working for us and going where we told it to. I read blogs about budgeting and researched everything I could get my hands on. It was so fun to me!

During this time we lived in an old farmhouse outside of town. We had chickens and milk goats and bottle calves. Our second child was born and it felt so wonderful to have the money to pay the midwife in full! We took a few wonderful trips and made so many memories. We paid $450 in rent, $350 truck payment, $115 car insurance, $120 in phones, our 401k and health insurance we automatically deducted from our paycheck and I really can't remember what those cost now. We budgeted $200/mo for food. We couldn't get internet at the farmhouse and there was no trash pick up either. We were on a well and septic so we didn't have those bills. The kicker was our electric. It ranged from $175-$800. The farmhouse had no insulation and had baseboard heat. That first winter was brutal. It was drafty and we shut off rooms of the house and only tried to heat the necessary ones. Even then, it was so expensive!

In December 2014 we did what had always seemed impossible for us, we bought our first home! My husband had gotten a pay raise and was making $65,000/yr. We bought a one bedroom 800 sq ft house in town for $42,000. We bought a car in cash. We cash flowed our renovations on our new house. We finally sold our truck that we had been underwater on and bought a second car in cash. For the first time in our marriage, we didn't have any debt but our mortgage. Our house payment was $234.34/mo. I could not believe how our finances had turned around! W/S/G was $85/mo, internet was $98/mo, homeowner insurance was $80/mo, and property taxes were $100/mo. Our cell phones were the same as before but our car insurance was down to $65 for both vehicles combined. We began consistently giving away 10% of our income. I was experimenting with our finances and constantly tweaking things and I decided to see if we could live on $1,800/mo as a family of 4 and save the rest. We could! Our living expenses were so low now and we were able to save half of our take home pay. This was incredible for us! We had never dreamed we would be able to save that much a month! During this whole time I found out that minimalism was a thing and it was so liberating. We had never been huge spenders or bought a ton of stuff but being raised to be frugal, we had kept EVERYTHING we had acquired in our 5 years of marriage. It was so freeing to realize that I didn't HAVE to keep things just in case I needed them and that I could get rid of things that we no longer needed or used. This helped greatly with our transition from a big farmhouse to our little home in town.

We got rid of tons of stuff and my home became my oasis, not something I was constantly managing and overwhelmed by. We saved up and paid for our first missions trip as a family, something that had always been on our hearts to do but something we never dreamed of being able to afford doing as a family without fundraising. All of a sudden, the possibilities were endless in front of us now that we had no debt! My husband got accepted to a two year program with Montana State University and we paid cash for his schooling and all his many trips associated with that. He traveled a lot for work as well, and we were able to afford to go with him and take little mini vacations every time he had to go somewhere. We got to see so many parts of Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota that we wouldn't have seen otherwise. It was a wonderful season of life.

In the spring of 2016, my husband was offered a job in Bozeman, MT. We had been wondering how long we would live on the Reservation. Our daughter was getting close to school age and we knew we wanted to homeschool but I knew only 1 family that homeschooled in that area and there was not any support group or activities for homeschool kids. Our church didn't have any kids for our children to play with and even though I had friends who hadn't started having children yet, or older women who had older children, we didn't have any friends really in the same season of life as us. Looking back, that isn't as important as it felt at the time. We were lonely and wanting more community. We took the job. We put our house on the market and moved to an apartment in Bozeman in July 2016. I had researched everything and knew what it would cost us to live but man, I was still in for a shock! Our apartment cost $1,455/mo plus utilities, we had to pay for parking unless we parked on the street (we parked on the street) and we were still paying for our home we owned and all the bills with that. Overnight our expenses went through the roof! It was quite the shock to go from saving half our income to saving a couple hundred dollars a month. We took a pay cut to take this job and had to pay for health insurance out of pocket for the first time. It had been automatically taken out of our paycheck before and the company paid 80% of it. What a shocker! We decided to go with Christian Healthcare Ministries and started off paying $135/mo. That wasn't bad at all, but it was just one more bill on top of all the other bills that were increasing our cost of living. By the time we left the Reservation, my husband had a base salary of $71,000/yr plus bonuses. One bonus was annual and the others were train bonuses when they would load rail cars of grain to ship out. They were nice extras. When we took the job in Bozeman, we took a salary of $65,000/yr and no bonuses. That coupled with all the increased living expenses and there was not much wiggle room. I began to realize that money management and keeping your cost of living as low as possible is where the real magic happens, not necessarily your income. A person living on a small income but with very low cost of living is better off than someone who makes good money, but has very high cost of living. Sometimes the person with less income actually ends up with more expendable money than the one making more.

Besides the sticker shock of living in a more populated place, we realized that as much as we liked visiting bigger towns and all they had to offer, we hated living in them! We had not realized just how much of a small town family we were until we moved there. We hated the traffic and all the options. I was overwhelmed by the size of the grocery stores and I had several grocery stores within just a few miles of our apartment. I was used to having one small grocery store with limited selection. While I loved having options to some degree, it was also very overwhelming! The views were beautiful and hiking options were wonderful, but we knew very quickly that living in an apartment with two small children in a populated area was not our cup of tea. The western side of Montana was very different from the eastern plains we had fallen in love with. As beautiful as western Montana was, I longed for the wide open fields of wheat and the small quaint towns and people of the eastern side of the state. We knew that after my husband graduated from MSU, we would be looking for some other place to live.

To be continued...