Love and Money: How Our Marriage Survived Debt

They say there’s a saver and a spender in every couple. Soon after getting married, I learned that my husband was the spender.

But although I coined myself the saver, I really wasn’t.

I was a spender too; I was unrealistically holding onto money whenever it would come in, and then emotionally spending it on big purchases like expensive shoes. My view on money and how I treated it was as equally damaging as if I had been spending money on frivolous things every day.

Spending Money Carelessly

It was clear that the two of us knew little about the realities of life and marriage, and we were so unaware of how incapable we were of working together productively toward our rosy future. This blissful ignorance set us up for a hard lesson in delusional living and spending, and ultimately, rock-bottom debt.

Right after my husband and I got married, we packed up to move to Las Vegas to start our new life together. It was such an exciting time. We didn’t have any jobs lined up, but we figured our wedding gift money of about $3,000 would last us until we found work, which we were optimistic would happen right away.

It turns out that it took us longer than expected to find a job–plus with the giddiness of living in a new city with my new husband, our wedding money ran out fast. Within a few months, we were seriously thinking about returning to Hawaii, our former home, but eventually we both landed jobs and were bringing in income. Not only that, but we finally moved out of a house full of roommates and into our very first apartment. It seemed as if we had finally carved out a place for ourselves.

Hitting Rock Bottom: Our Car Got Repossessed

I held several different jobs while we were in Las Vegas, one of which was at a financial services firm. I was hired on as a temp, but when the economy crashed in 2008, I was laid off.

For the next three months, I went on an intensive job hunt, attended interviews and got callbacks, but no one hired me.

At the same time, credit card companies were calling asking for payments. Our landlord called, wondering why we hadn’t paid the rent for the past couple of months. I was scared.

One day, while we were getting ready in the morning, my husband was listening to a voicemail and abruptly ran out of the house. In a few minutes, he came back inside and announced, “They took our car!”

That was it; I was sure I was going to break. That was absolute last thing we needed to happen to us at that time.

Embarrassingly, our parents sent us the $400 we needed to get our car back from repossession.

Finally, with this incident and three months of unemployment weighing on us, we made the decision to move back to Hawaii. It was a tough decision for me because I had been so sure that I was going to “make it” away from home. Our parents had to fund everything to bring us back. To me, it was beyond humiliating.

Moving back into my parents’ house was such a big blow to me; I think that I must have been depressed. I felt this way for a very long while and I know it affected everyone around me.

I had a hard time letting go and moving on. Eventually though, I went to work and set goals to make sure that we could move back to Las Vegas within a year. All of our furniture was in storage, waiting for us to come back. But as much as I was hoping to move back, it was difficult because we still owed people money: our landlord, credit card and student loan companies.

When my husband and I finally hit rock bottom with our finances, we were forced to reevaluate everything.

Life After Debt: Taking Control of Our Finances

We decided to embark upon a journey to study personal development and finances so that we would never go through this struggle again. For the past couple of years, we have studied the work of Dave Ramsey, T. Harv Eker, Darren Hardy, Jim Rohn, and Dani Johnson to become better financial managers.

We’ve not only learned how to spend, save, and where to allocate our money, but how to have a healthier perspective on finances and how to efficiently manage money and not allow it to manage us.

With consistency, we have paid off our car loan and several credit cards.

What we have learned is that almost always, financial problems have nothing to do with money. Most of the time, it has something to do with the behavior and habits behind the spending. Money is only a result of the decisions we have made, and our wallets and checkbooks are a reflection of these decisions.

I believe that becoming better in the area of finances is not a destination, it’s a journey.

There will always be opportunities to grow, and my husband and I not only want to take advantage of these opportunities for ourselves, but we have made it a goal to share these opportunities to as many people who are willing to make the change to become better.

We are now in the process of creating an organization that provides individuals and families with the tools and opportunities they need to create a better life. Because of what we have gone through, we have made it our mission to help others build a financially successful life.