I’ve been talking a lot about wanting to pay off debt and starting to use cash, and I think it’s time that I step back and tell you our financial story.
In the podcast about infertility and adoption, I told you our story about how Greg and I dated, got married, tried to have children and eventually adopted both of our kids.
By 2002, we had two children, we had been married seven years and we were both earning a great income.
From 2002 until 2007, I continued to do Creative Memories along with additional income earning opportunities. Our children have challenges to overcome medically, but we were able to do that with great health insurance and great incomes.
Around 2007, my direct sales company income started to decline. Our children were also officially diagnosed in 2007 and 2008 with multiple disabilities including learning disabilities and ADHD.
While I had always been proactive in our children’s medical needs, I became obsessed with alternatively looking for solutions to their diagnoses.
Not realizing how much our income was declining, I was increasing the amount that we were spending on alternative solutions by more than what we were making. Plus, I figured I would work on the kids and then increase my income… like I always had.
I didn’t want to have any regrets at the end of raising our children and say oh if I had tried this… or if I had sent them to that…
So I did it all. Went to doctors in different states. Did the gluten-free, casein-free diet. Expanded that diet to limit 32 foods for our daughter and I cooked every single morsel she ate from scratch for 18 months. And all of those morsels were gluten-free and locally grown if possible. Our food bill alone was $1400 a month!
That didn’t count the thousands of dollars every month I was spending on alternative treatments and supplements.
Our children had already been enrolled in a very nice Montessori school in 2006. But it became evident that our son would need to go to the local learning disability school, Springer School and Center. There really wasn’t an option, and again I didn’t want any regrets, so we just put the tuition on the credit card.
In 2008, my father’s health failed. I spent that year traveling from Cincinnati to Akron at the drop of a hat. At one point, I had to fly out to California as well. And we all know what the economy was doing at that time….
My father died in the spring of 2009. My children also had significant medical issues in that year. These two experiences of needing to take care of my father and needing to take care of my children caused me to be able to contribute to our family financially even less. Not that that really mattered, because the whole economy was collapsing all around us.
In 2009, I had 9 Schedule C’s on my tax return. I represented three direct sales business. I also taught part time at the Montessori school that my children used to attend. I cleaned houses, organized them and even tutored children at home.
Any job opportunity that was offered to me, I would take. I was constantly figuring out how to fit more into our calendar. Every single job was flexible, so I would squeeze it in so that the children and my father’s needs could come first.
By 2009, I was a hot mess. Because of all of my experience in the alternative community for special needs children, I started a business called Warrior Mama. I thought that my brand would be helping other mothers like me navigate the systems…political and governmental systems, the healthcare system, and the school system, all of which are necessary to provide for their children’s needs.
I am capable of doing those things, but they do not fill me up. I do them out of necessity as a mother and out of my obsessive researching personality. My blog, Warrior Mama, was hard to write, very personal, and I felt in the long term not what my children want to have on the Internet.
At this point, the only consistent paycheck that I had coming in was from Mannatech. I was still tutoring, organizing, cleaning houses and working at the Montessori school. In the spring of 2010, an opportunity presented itself for a part-time middle school math and science teacher at the Montessori school. I applied and was offered the position.
A few weeks after starting school, enrollment increased to the point where the position became full-time. While we weren’t sure if we could handle me working full-time, we knew that we needed the income and it was a stable paycheck in a time where there wasn’t a lot of stability in the country.
The fall of 2011 started my second year of working full time. We liked the consistent paycheck, but it wasn’t enough to meet our expenses, so we also made the decision that we had gone into debt for long enough. We decided that we would need to put Joey into the local public school.
After making that change, we quickly realized that Joey needed to go back to Springer School and Center and spent the first 10 weeks of the school year trying to get him back into that environment. In December 2011, I resigned from my teaching position in order to take care of more medical needs that our children had. Our home life was suffering too much with me being a full-time employee. The bottom line was that no one could step in and be mom if I wasn’t being mom. But somebody else could take my teaching position.
That spring, it was decided that Abby also needed to go to Springer School and Center. In January 2012, I started Organize 365 the blog as well as my full-time professional organization business in Cincinnati.
I had a vision for where Organize 365 would go, but I didn’t realize how long it would take to realize my vision!
Having been in direct sales, I knew that there was income opportunity working at home around your family’s needs, and that’s what fueled me to create my own opportunity with Organize 365.
The biggest hurdle I ran into was that when you work for a direct sales company, the company takes care of the marketing, the brand recognition, and the products. In Organize 365, I had to do it all by myself.
I continued to work multiple jobs in 2012 to get Organize 365 off the ground.
Since my income has always fluctuated, it is hard to make a budget based on what you will have to spend. In addition, I am irrational in my spending habits when it comes to meeting the needs of my children. My philosophy has always been- I will work harder- I will work more jobs – I will earn more money.
So, over the last 14 years, we’ve had periods of excess in our money and periods of credit card debt. And I continue to find ways to make more money or find money to pay off the credit card debts. Then, when I find a treatment or service that our children need, and I think is warranted, I will not hesitate to use credit cards to put the expenses on them.
So I do not regret that we’ve had credit card debt in the last 14 years. Our very first debt was a second mortgage to fund Joey’s adoption, which we were able to pay off within 14 months. As you heard on my podcast, I waited about six weeks before I started another second mortgage to fund the Abby’s adoption.
I grew up with the money story that debt is an acceptable means to fund non-throwaway purchases. What I mean by that is that my kids need to go to their private schools, so if I need to go into debt for them to go, then that’s acceptable.
Over the years Hubby’s and my comfort level with the amount of debt that we have has fluctuated. There were periods where I thought that we should have no debt, even though we did have debt. And currently, our debt is higher than it’s ever been and is more stressful to me than it’s ever been before.
I guess I’m to the point where I realize that I’m always going to be able to justify putting something on a credit card -especially if it has something to do with my children. And I’m always going to be able to say, well, I’ll continue to shop at consignment stores or not buy clothes for X amount of months…or… years….
But now that I’m in my 40s, I’m starting to make lifestyle decisions that require spending money for me. I do not regret any of the purchases that are currently on our credit cards. Hubby and I often comment that we are very blessed to have such an amazing amount of credit available to us.
I do not have any regrets about all the therapy, schools and treatments that we have provided for our children. It has allowed me to be the mother that I wanted to be to these children and to make sure that I left no stone unturned in preparing them for their future lives.
Now that our children are 13 and 14, I realize that if I continue on this path of using credit to fund things that we want that are not medical or educational necessities, I am setting up a bad money story for them going forward.
I am confident that I can work 9 to 11 different kinds of jobs at all different times of the days… weeks… months. But that’s me, and not most people.
When I look at my children’s futures and what their future income opportunities will be, I want to be able to set them up for success.
The world is different for this generation that it was for mine. Credit and debt are seen much differently today than they were in the 80s and 90s. The fact that my husband has had the same job since the day he graduated college is not normal anymore. Without that consistency in our family, my harebrained business ideas would never have been possible.
We are spending so much less money now that we are using cash. I love that our children are seeing us make transactions in cash as opposed to using credit. Both of our children are extremely literal. Abstract concepts are not their strength. Credit and credit cards are very abstract ideas.
I knew when I started sharing that I was going to trying to get out of debt, that I could potentially be writing blog posts about it in the future. Going forward, I’m going to be writing some very specific blog posts about how we create a budget, how I figured out what amounts of money to put in those budget categories and how we divide out our cash into an envelope system.
I learn SO much from you here in the comments! Share your financial story and the strategies you have successfully used to get out of debt!
The post My Financial Story appeared first on Organize 365.