- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
- 1
-
Sparkle (0)
I think that it’s a big thing that I can say that Jessie and I never fight about money. When things are tight and we are stressed about how we are going to make our money stretch, we are able to sit and talk it out without fighting about it. This is a part of my marriage that makes me very proud.
Oh, it wasn’t always like that. We had to do a trial by fire to learn how to calm the hell down where money was concerned. We learned young, and we learned hard.
I was 19 when we moved in together. We moved into a small trailer in our college town. It was our first love nest. Things were cheap, which was good since we were both still in school. We both worked as work studies and made next to nothing. We lived lean, but that was okay with us.
We had two credit cards, one in his name and one in my name. Both had insanely small limits so we were never in any horrible danger of getting in over our heads. The credit cards were used mainly as a way to break the monotony of being broke by splurging on dinner and a movie every now and then.
Then about a year later my mom moved to PA to live with her boyfriend. We took over her house and her mortgage payments. The mortgage payments were actually a little bit cheaper than the monthly lot rental we paid on the trailer. We thought we’d found a sweet deal. But then we discovered termites. And a completely rotten roof. And a completely rotten exterior wall. And a rotten floor. And sub-par electrical wiring. And burst water pipes.
By this time, Jessie had gotten his degree and was working for an upstart company (it’s only employee) and was making $20k a year. With my still being in school and doing my work study program, we weren’t bringing in much more than $23k a year together.
I can blame the hardships on that house falling to shit. In all honesty it was part of the problem. But we had a lot of help, too. I can blame the credit card debt on the fact that we were promised a lot more help with the paying of our wedding than we actually received. A lot of shitty circumstances came our way all at once and we were bulldozed into a corner.
The simple truth is that we were young, inexperienced, and not as careful as we could have been. I dropped out of school and got a job. Jessie got a raise to $30k a year. That helped a little, but we ended up in that vicious cycle of paying the minimum payment on our credit cards (one of which had a limit on it far too high for us to keep up with) and then not having enough money to pay bills and buy food, so we’d have to use the credit cards to take care of that stuff. We fought a lot about money in those days.
Then the offer was made to move to Seattle. The small company was wanting to expand and WV simply wasn’t the place in which to do that. We seized an opportunity to leave WV (something so few residents of that state actually do) and left for the West coast.
WV is a poverty state. When we left, the number one employer in our area was Walmart. Food is cheaper there. Utilities are cheaper. Living was cheaper. We suffered from a massive and constant case of sticker shock for about 6 months when we first got to Washington. And yet another set of unfortunate circumstances gripped us. We were 3,000 miles from anyone and anything we ever knew. We were without a car, and although the one person we knew in the area had previously offered to be of help in the transportation department, we soon learned he was a bit of an unreliable flake. Jessie had to get to work, so we had to buy a car. Not knowing that you could get financing on used cars (again, we were young) we bought a
