Living on $14,500 a Year: Our Debt-Free Story
When I first started my podcast, or when I first felt that special “calling” to do a podcast, I didn’t think that I had much to share. Then, God started showing me some of the things that He wanted me to share in this podcast. At first, I was really excited about sharing parts of my stories, but then, I suddenly began to be attacked and ridiculed for my experiences that lead to these stories along with my outcomes and opinions. There were some who soon labeled me as a “know-it-all” and told me that no one wants to hear anything that I have to say. Even though deep down, I knew that wasn’t true and that it was clearly an attack from the enemy (because I knew with all my heart that God would never say those words to me), I still allowed those words to shut me up and make me timid from sharing my stories. And, not long before those words were spoken to me, I found myself surrounded by some who shared their stories more loudly than me, and even though they had very different experiences and outcomes, I began to feel that my stories weren’t as great as theirs, and that began to put a spirit of timidity inside me, so when I was told that no one wanted to hear my stories, it was very easy for me to shy away from telling them and maybe even use that as an excuse for not telling them.
However… recently, a lot of things have changed, and I am getting my confidence AND my voice back! I am realizing that I DO have something to share, and I am committed to sharing it with you. I want to say a GREAT BIG THANK YOU to all of you who have reached out to me…encouraging me with your kind words and inspiring me to keep on keeping on. YOU have given me a new feeling of confidence that is growing every day, and I appreciate you more than you know. So, having said all of that… I am very excited to share with you today… our debt-free story…
My husband and I have a lot of really great stories of living debt-free. It truly is a passion of ours that started when we became engaged in 1996 (before we ever heard of Dave Ramsey). We decided that we didn’t want to start a marriage with debt because we had seen the destruction that debt can cause in a marriage (and just in life in general), and we knew that we wanted no part of that. I can tell you that there is no faster way of getting out of debt than to tell your fiance that you cannot marry him until we are both debt-free! And, we did it! We were completely debt-free the day we got married.
When we started dating and for about 5 years after we got married, my husband was a drummer for a Christian Music Band, named The Waiting. He did that gig for about 12+ years (mostly years before marriage and then, like I said, about 5 years after). About a year after we got married, I was given the opportunity to travel the country with him and do a lot of odd jobs here and there. I became their truck driver (YEP! You heard that right!) Then, eventually, I took care of all of their merchandise. I worked with World Vision for sponsored children. I learned how to become a drum-tech and a stage manager. And, then at one point, I was hired as a videographer for the Newsboys. Basically, I did any job that I could do to earn money, and yes, it was fun, but it was also super hard work! At times, it could be physically, mentally, and emotionally draining all at the same time.
I say all of this because it was basically the opportunity of a lifetime, and I could not have taken this amazing opportunity had we not been completely debt-free. I had a great job that I could have easily made into a career, but that was not my dream, and because we were debt-free, I was able to make a choice instead of having the choice be made for me, and I would have definitely missed out on all the awesome sights and amazing places that we got to see and visit together before starting a family.
But… it wasn’t all as glamorous as it may seem. While traveling on the road, we made…are you ready for this?!?… a whopping $14,500/year! Nope! There’s no need to adjust the volume on your phone or hit that rewind button because you obviously heard me wrong. We literally made $14,500/year, but we lived like no one else while doing it! (And, as I said before, this was before we had ever heard of Dave Ramsey!)
But, we were very passionate about living on what we made; no matter what we made, and we believe that God honored that and believe that God can and will honor that for you too, but it has to be a true desire. You have to live it, for Him to honor it.
None of our friends or our family knew that we made that little money, and we definitely did not let on that we did. We paid our own way for everything we did. We didn’t expect other people to pick up our tab when we went out. You know those people. My hubs and I call them debt-free martyrs. They are living debt-free or on very little income; all the while letting you know everything they refuse to buy because they are living debt-free or don’t make much money. It’s like it’s automatically expected from you to pay their way because of the sacrifices they are making for their family, or they wear it like a badge-of-honor. If we had the money, we went out. If we didn’t, we stayed in and would sometimes just invite others to come to our little apartment to hang out with us.
We lived in a duplex apartment and paid rent. We paid for all of our utilities and car maintenance. We had great clothes, and this is when I really learned how to shop wisely. We did not live on Ramen Noodles. We had plenty of good food to eat and plenty of entertainment. We really did not feel that we were sacrificing a lot of extra stuff. We really didn’t feel deprived at all.
Also, during this time, my husband’s band had just signed with a record company in Nashville. They were recording another album, and my husband was putting an enormous amount of miles on his car. He was driving about 100 miles a day between our house and the studio where they were recording; plus countless and very frequent trips to Nashville from our home in Atlanta. Eventually, his motor said, “I’m done!” and it gave out on his car, BUT we did not panic because we had enough money SAVED in order to replace his car. We replaced the car because it made more financial sense to do that than to replace the motor. It was an older Acura, and we were able to buy a newer Acura in much better condition with far fewer miles than it would have cost to replace the engine in his other car.
So… my encouragement here is that we did it, and I am VERY passionate that others can too! (Sometimes a little too passionate, and I do have to tone it down a bit.)
Then, about 4 ½ years after we got married, we became pregnant, and my husband decided to come off the road because we were gone A LOT, and he wanted to be home while raising our first son, and let’s face it… $14,500/year may be ok for a traveling newlywed couple, but it is not an income that we wanted to raise our children on, so came off the road and got a full-time job, and I got a part-time job…at our church, where we started making a combined income of about $40,000/year. Can you imagine the excitement that we had from almost tripling our income? We were so excited about this that we decided that we needed to buy THINGS in order to celebrate! So, within the first year of our raise, we bought a house. We bought a minivan (because here in America, everyone knows that having one child immediately constitutes to the need to have a 7 passenger vehicle), we got our very first credit card as a married couple (that was exciting), and then, we purchased another car for my husband, and we got a dog. Well, the dog was free, but about a month after we got her, we suddenly realized that she had never been spayed…something we never thought to ask the previous owners. Good thing we had a credit card though because I’ll tell you what…if you’ve ever had a female dog allowed to stay inside the house, and then you suddenly realize that she has not been spayed, THAT can definitely be a true emergency! As it turned out, as I was in the hospital having our first son, our dog was being spayed in another hospital…literally at the same time.
During the next 3 years, we struggled to make ends meet. Our bank account was in the red EVERY month, and we just kept on making one bad decision after another. Then, finally, we had had enough! We buckled down, learned the word NO again, cut up and canceled our credit card, and we took the next year and paid everything off! That was around 2006, and we’ve been debt-free (again) ever since (except for our house).
During this time, we had been teaching our now two boys about living debt-free. We taught them from a very young age that “the borrower is a slave to the lender.” (Proverbs 22:7), and they both have chosen to live a debt-free life for themselves as well. Granted, they are both teenagers who still live at home, but they have both imitated this concept already with choices that they’ve been given to make.
One of the very first stories that I can remember about teaching our son’s to live debt-free is with our oldest. He was about 5 years old at the time, and he wanted a Bumble Bee Transformer. This toy was around $20, so I thought that this would be a great opportunity for him to learn how to work hard for the money, save up, and buy it himself with cash. It took him a few months, but he did it. Every time we would visit family or friends, he would ask if he could do a job for money. It got a little embarrassing because he would tell them that he was trying to save up $20 for a toy, and people would look at me like I was a horrible mom for not buying my kid a toy that only costs 20 bucks. His grandparents wanted to just buy it for him, but I wouldn’t let them, and they thought that was horrible as well. However, he finally saved enough money to go buy Bumblebee.
So, off to Walmart, we went! As soon as we got there, he ran off to the toy aisle; only to find NO Bumble Bee! Oh! No! I did NOT think about the part where they might sell out or even stop selling them during the time that it took for him to save up enough money to buy it, so… off we went to another store, then another, then another! (This was before I had a cell phone, so I couldn’t call each store before arriving, and this was before I even knew what Amazon was.)
Finally, we arrived at our last store but before going into this one, we sat in the parking lot and prayed that they would have at least ONE Bumblebee! In that prayer, I also quietly and secretly told God that this was NOT how this was supposed to turn out and that if He wanted our son to also learn to save up and pay with cash then I needed Him to come through as well. Then…we trotted into the store, and quickly saw that they had ONLY ONE Bumblebee left! My son VERY quickly snatched that thing off the shelf and tucked it under his arm as if he was just daring anyone to even think about taking it from him. We proceeded to the checkout to purchase it, and he had taken all of his money with him, but what I didn’t think about was the fact that his money was all in change! So, we decided to go through the self-checkout to spare any cashier the headache and hassle of counting it all, and we stood there, for what seemed like forever, inserting each and every quarter, dime, and nickel into that slot like we were in Vegas (And, now that I said that I guess I didn’t think that part through either.)
So, my favorite part about this is when we got back to the car. We relived the last few hours going from store to store looking for Bumblebee. This is when I was at the OTHER end of the teachable moment when my son began to remind me that “we went into the first store and didn’t find Bumblebee. We went to the next one and they didn’t have it either, then we went to another one, but before we went into this store, we actually prayed and asked God to let there be one on the shelf for me, and God listened to our prayer because Bumblebee was there!” I was so proud of my son for putting this all together, and I said, “Yeah! We did! And, God came through! Isn’t it just awesome that He cares so much about what we care about?” Then, my son responded with, “Yeah…maybe we should have prayed that prayer before going into the first store.”
Isn’t that just like us? To pray when things get tough and not necessarily at the beginning? Yes! We were both each other’s students that day!
Our sons are teenagers now, and at the time of this release, they are 13 and 17. Our 17-year-old is the one who saved up for Bumblebee, and he is now saving up for another car…his very first car. He has been saving for a while, and we have offered to match his savings…up to a certain point. He has a semi-part-time job now where he has been saving 70% of his income and is going to add another part-time job very soon while he finishes up high school. He is also currently dual-enrolled in college. We love watching him develop his work-ethic and learning how to manage his school and time during the process.
We are also a homeschooling family, so we have more time flexibility than students who attend a brick-n-mortar school. We have a lot of flexibility in the curriculum that we use as well, and for high school economics, we are using Dave Ramsey’s Foundations for Personal Finance Curriculum that Dave wrote for middle and high-schoolers, and we highly recommend this curriculum. Whether your child is homeschooled or attends a hybrid or traditional schooling program, we highly recommend this curriculum; even as a supplement to whatever your child is currently learning. You can easily add it to your routine. I will put a link in my show notes and also on my “favorite things” page – where you can find that by going to teaoflifepodcast.com/myfavoritethings. So, as I was saying, we’ve been doing this curriculum for economics, and it’s been great! And, because we have been listening to Dave on the radio, podcasts, and YouTube on a regular basis in our home since our children were very small, we have found that going through this curriculum isn’t tough at all, and both of our children already know most of what is being taught. This just gives us a chance to talk in detail about it all as Dave presents it in each chapter.
Our kids have grown up this way, and they don’t know any other way of life. They are very quick to understand when something is not in the budget or when we don’t actually have a budget category for something, we have to make one, which means taking money from another category in order to do it. They understand what this means, and I love to tell people that my kids have never pitched a fit because they wanted a toy in the toy aisle at Target. It was just a way of life from their beginning, and they don’t know life any other way. They understood that if we didn’t have the money, we didn’t have the money, and that was that.
They ask frequently is something is in the budget, or “do we have enough budget left for…” whatever it is that they want or want to do. They even offer to pay for certain things with their personal money, just so we can do them, and sometimes we let them; even when we have the money to pay for it ourselves. We still let them…sometimes. We want them to know what it feels like to spend your own cash (sometimes, in their case, all of your cash) and not have anything left for other stuff. We want them to feel the weight of that decision while they are living under our roof and we can help shelter and lead them through it and talk about it. If we didn’t allow them to mishandle their money a little bit and learn from that while living at home, they will learn how to mishandle it after they move out and while out on their own, and the results of that will be WAY more devastating and scarring than while they are at home. We don’t dictate what they can and can’t buy with their money. We do lead them; guide them, advise them, and try to point them in the right direction, but we want their financial decisions to be their own. If they want to save for a year and then spend it all on one item, then we let them, but I can tell you that it has only taken one time for them to do that and learn from it. They didn’t like the feeling of no longer having any money, and they also realized that the item they bought only brought temporary satisfaction and that actually having money in their savings or spending accounts brings lasting satisfaction. Spending cash hurts a little, and they learn that while living at home.
However, since we have lived debt free for so long now, it’s usually pretty easy to find the money for things that we want (totally within reason of course), and they recognize that too. We have also noticed that God seems to come through a lot more for our financial requests when we are debt-free or even dedicated to being debt-free than He does when we are continually mishandling money. We feel that God honors the debt-free-ness and provisions come out of nowhere that can ONLY be attributed to God. Scripture tells us in Luke 16:10 that “One who is faithful [with] little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest [with] little is also dishonest in much.”
If you’ve listened to the last few podcasts, you already know that my husband just changed jobs and has taken another amazing opportunity to do what he really loves. He’s traveling again, but this time, it’s on the production side of it all. Our kids are older now, and it’s just a good fit for our family now. God has been amazing through it all and has provided beyond our comprehension.
As I shared in my episode called Feeling Stuck, when he was let go from his job, he wasn’t sure what he would be doing; however, we didn’t stress about it at all. Because we are debt-free with a good emergency fund, we knew that we would be totally fine, and we knew that we would continue to be totally fine because of all the hard work and sacrifices we have made over the years. That day, when my husband came home and told me that he had been let go and didn’t know what he was going to do, I responded with, “Are you kidding me? I know exactly what we’re going to do! We’re going sailing!” However, we haven’t been sailing much this season because God had other plans, and Brandon has been busy beyond measure traveling all over and running production for live events for some amazing people and groups! But…I would have never had the opportunity to respond that way had we been completely saturated in debt. I can imagine that that conversation would have gone much differently had our dollars had other people’s names written all over them.
I hope that you have found some encouragement in today’s episode and that it’s able to “transform every attitude” that you have about your finances. It’s not about how much you make. It’s about what you do with what you make. As scripture says, those who are faithful with little will be given more. Are you being faithful with what you have been given? If you haven’t, making more money will not solve your financial problems. Being faithful with the money that you currently have will solve your financial problems. If you are not good with your money now, you will continue to not be good with your money when you get more. We have personally witnessed this in our lives with others around us.
Know that I am praying for you, my listeners. Thank you for joining me in today’s talk, and if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to leave me a comment or email me at Tiffany@teaoflifepodcast.com. I will also be happy to answer any budgeting questions that you may have regarding your own personal road to financial freedom.
