Reader PF Story: Broken Beginnings

Katherine, who blogs at Simple Savings Mom, will be sharing her personal finance story over the next several weeks. Here is the beginning…

My husband and I met while I was on staff with a college ministry when he was a sophomore in college. We became friends, but did not begin dating until his senior year. Even then, financial struggles were a part of both of our lives. I was trying to keep up with the fashion and life of young college students and he loved new gadgets and metro clothes. We were both growing in the Lord and in our convictions, but we were not really open to anyone about this area of our lives. We had a knack for making it look pretty on the outside by using our credit cards. As we moved toward marriage, we knew we had financial issues to address, but we were young and in love and more worried about other issues in life…like what kind of wedding we wanted to have!

After we were married, we had more motivation to deal with our finances but, we lacked clear direction on how to fix the problems. BJ was working with the same college ministry as me. That is when we decided to take a stab at our financial state by having me work two part-time jobs. In total, I worked about 20 hours between them. The problem with all of this, was that though we had desire to deal with the debt, we continued to spend unwisely. Hindsight seems to be twenty-twenty! We lived in a small, cheap apartment and did not have excessive luxuries, but we made bad decisions. We ate out a lot, bought a used car, and purchased nice clothes. We were working to get out of debt but not changing our habits of spending over our budget.

At the end of the year came a job move to another college campus. We had transferred our debt to smaller interest cards (hoping to pay it off quickly) and thought we could live on a tighter budget and still get by. At the time of our move, the construction and loan businesses were booming, and we moved ourselves into a cute little home with a 5-year Adjusted Rate Mortgage. We paid no PMI and consoled ourselves with the fact that there just was no other place to move in this small little town. We were moving with lots of optimism, little realism and a small chunk of debt…

Katherine blogs at Simple Savings Mom where she shares about frugal living, great deals, and couponing. She and her family are enjoying the creativity and adventurous life of learning to live on less and ministering to college students full time. She is the mother to two young boys and wife to BJ.

If you would like to share your personal finance story, please share it with me via the Guest Post Submission page. I would love to hear it, and share, in hopes to inspire someone as well!!

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