Our Money Journey - Part One

I was reading another blog, The 76K Project, and she and I are of a similar age.  Months ago she took a walk down memory lane, she wrote about life and financial journey; I thought I’d do the same for my 40^th year.

She only wrote about her last decade, I think I’ll write about my last two decades, as I feel that’s really when our financial story begins.

When I started this entry, I thought it would be short and sweet, but as I wrote it, the post got longer and longer. Because of how long this post became I decided to break it up into three posts. This post was a long time coming. I started it nearly a year ago and there it languished in my “drafts”, mostly done, but waiting for the last couple of years to be filled in. I don’t know why but I put off writing it. When I opened it and decided to finish it today, I really enjoyed going back and reading what I wrote and finishing it up. But, honestly, our financial journey is still in progress.

Like I said, I never imagined this would grow into a three part series, but once I got started, I just kept writing! This is part one of our financial journey. Parts two and three will be coming in future weeks. Part one details our journey from age 20 to 28. Part two will be about our finances from age 28 to 38 and part three will be about our finances over the last couple of years.

At age 20, I was living at home and attending community college. My parents couldn’t afford to help me financially so I was on the hook for all college expenses myself. (*Note, I was able to live at home, rent-free and that in itself is a form of major help!) I played soccer and my coach there really liked me and helped me to get a full-ride athletic scholarship.  I lived at school from ages 21 – 22 and left college debt free. At the same time, The Husband lived at home and worked at a crummy job that paid tuition reimbursement, so he also left college debt free.

Age 22 – 25

I moved home when my athletic eligibility ran out, not because I couldn’t have finished my education, but because I was so homesick I was ready to be home. By this time, my dad had retired and ironically made more money retired than he made working so he was able to help me financially with the rest of my school.

While I was away at school, The Husband graduated college and got a job working in IT for a large, Bay Area-based company. It was close to home and the most money he had ever made.

Also, 5 months after moving back home, The Husband and I got married. We got married on the cheap… before it was trendy to do so. We spent $7500 on our entire wedding: dress/tux, venue, DJ, flowers, food, photographer, everything. However we didn’t have the money to do that at the time. We cashed out a small 401K The Husband had had to pay for the wedding.

We moved in with my parents while I finished college and got my credential.

We also had our first child.

Age 25 – 27

We lived with my parents for just over two years.

Then we bought our first house. We had no money in savings and no down payment. No problem, right?

We borrowed $6000 from my sister and her husband to “have in the bank” as savings when we bought our house.

At this time mortgage companies were doing lots of shady things and because we had good credit, we qualified for a 0% down, interest only loan, with a variable rate. In fact, we had two loans: one at 80% and one at 20%, both interest only.

When we bought our home, we didn’t buy more than we could afford, however, we had all these new bills we’d never had to pay before and I was only working retail 50%. I worked two days one week and three days the next. Any money we needed over and above our earnings was put on the credit card.

Our credit cards were nearly maxed out and we were living paycheck to paycheck. We had to pay my sister and brother-in-law back and money was tight. We were never late on any bills and never went over the limit on our credit card, but our financial situation was rough!

Tune in next week to read the next step in our journey!