How My Husband Was Right... :/

Originaly written on 5/10/12

Donny loves to be right. I love to be right. You can imagine what might happen with this mix. We are often saying to each other, "Bet me!" All in good fun though, not fighting. We never actually bet money or an item, just in case you were wondering. The winner always gets to rub it in a little, much to the losers disappointment. Our bets are usually little things like, "Bet you that's a one way street", "bet you that person will win the competition", stuff like that.

Recently, Donny and I started on a course to try and change our lives. We have been like most people in America, we live with debt. We had credit card debt and two car loans. We never thought much of this. We just accepted that this was life, this was how you did things. We were not over our heads. We always made our payments, we were never late on purpose. (I'm a little forgetful so sometimes our payment would be a little late from my forgetfulness. Oops.)

Years ago when Donny changed jobs we took a bit of a pay cut. We were still doing fine financially. Donny has always worked two jobs, our whole marriage, which is coming up on six years. :) Woot woot! At that time his night job was bar tending. The money was great, I'm not gonna lie. We used a little of it to help with the bills but the rest was for fun. We had a great time. We ate out all the time at great restaurants, we took our friends with us, we bought toys, we gave a lot of money away to help others. But mostly, we just spent it. May I take a moment to say that we are not proud of this time in our lives. We see now that there is a different, better way to live. A number of things led us to this new way of thinking. When I look back on it I can see what God was trying to teach us and we were just a little slow in coming around.

Donny was offered a promotion at his day job but the hours he worked would change so to take the promotion he would have to quit the bar. We prayed about this a lot as we knew it would mean a loss of income and a change of life but we both felt like the promotion was the right thing to do. So, we set to work and re-did our budget. We found that we could still pay for everything and have a little spending money but in an effort to be able to save some money we decided to refinance my car. This proved just to be a smart idea in general. Our interest rate on my car was 8.5% or something like that. With the refinance it brought the interest rate down to 3% and cut our payments in half. Awesome!! And we kept on in life.

Eventually, Donny found another night job, dealing poker at the local card room, that worked with his new day hours. Kinda random but whatever helps. But that was also the year that we learned the extent of our fertility issues and we were facing either $10,000 a round for IVF or a $30,000 adoption. Money, all of a sudden, became a huge issue.

Fast forward to February of this year. Donny and I had been talking a lot about money and trying to figure out when to start an adoption. The year before we decided that it would be best to wait till we were out of debt before we started the adoption. By our calculations that would be two years from that point. I was really bummed about that. If we waited two years to start the adoption and then most adoptions take two years that would mean it would be four years before I was a mother, before Donny was a father. So, in February we starting a financial course that I'm sure many of you have heard of...Financial Peace University by Dave Ramsey. We had no idea what we were going to learn or what this would actually do to our lives. We just knew that we were tired of the way we were living and we knew we needed something to change if we were ever going to get this adoption ball rolling.

The course was 13 weeks long and I am proud to say that we are debt free!!! You heard me right. Not only are we debt free but we did it in 13 weeks, not two years. It's amazing what happens when you start handling money the way God intended. My amazing husband has sacrificed so much in working a second job to make this possible. He runs on very little sleep and works very long days. His usual day puts him at his first job at 9 or 10am to 7pm, start the second job at 8pm and usually gets off around 2am, many nights much later than that, asleep by 3 or 3:30 and up at 7:30. I don't know how he does it. He truly amazes me and I am so grateful for him. I don't know many men that would do what he is doing for us. And he's not just doing this temporarily. He's going to continue to work those crazy hours so I can be home for at least the first year that we have a kid to help in the bonding process. Seriously, best husband ever!! :)

But back to how he was right. At around the third financial class Donny started running numbers and told me that he thought we would be out of debt in December, not next year. I thought he was crazy and told him so. I didn't think there was any way that would happen and just figured that he forgot to carry a one or something when he was doing his math. But, at 2 p.m. on Tuesday I stood in a bank crying as I paid off our last debt. :) That's me, the emotional one. I'm pretty sure the teller thought I was crazy.

When I got home that night I wanted to scream out over the canyon, "I'M DEBT FREE!!!" And I wanted Donny to join me. When I asked him, all excited and giddy like, how he was feeling about being debt free he said, "I'm waiting to hear something". I had no clue what he was getting at. "What are you waiting to hear?", I asked. Of course he replied, "Um, that I was right". Dang it! I knew that was going to bite me in the ass. I had to hand it to him. Not only was he right but we were out of debt 7 months before his prediction. I sighed a little acknowledging my own defeat before I said, "You were right Donny, you were right".