Going through money struggles can feel like wandering in the wilderness. Our time in the “wilderness” taught me perseverance, patience, and contentment. My goal is to be an encouragement to others and they could learn from the situations we faced. I will share over a few posts what we went through and how God brought us to the other side.

Newlyweds

When my husband and I married, Dan was a youth pastor in a small town located in Washington State, and I did not have a job. Money was a little tight, but God provided and we managed. I did not have illusions of being well off; I knew before we married that youth pastors didn’t make much money and I was fine with that. What I didn’t realize was the extent of the credit card debt that my husband had, but in the beginning I didn’t think about our money situation a whole lot. I assumed that was Dan’s area.

When we entered our second year of marriage, I was hired as a first grade teacher at a nearby Christian school and doubled our income. That new influx of money was awesome! Dan and I ate out regularly, went to movies, and planned a vacation to Disney World. None of those things are bad, but our priorities were out of whack. Instead of paying off debt first and building our savings, we failed to plan for the future.

Change

Then life began to change for us. God was leading Dan to another youth pastor position in California and I quit my job. I gave birth to our first child and we needed a bigger car. On a positive note, neither of us wanted to increase our debt with buying a new car. We learned it is better to buy used because of depreciation. Anyway, with help from family and friends, we packed up our new (to us) van and moving truck and headed to California.

Here we were in California, with no family or friends in a new city. Our small family took up residence in a duplex which we rented for about a year and a half. After getting pregnant with our second child, Dan and I realized we would soon grow out of our duplex. Our savings was small, so we borrowed money from Dan’s parents and used a first time home buyers program to put a down payment on our first house. Now we had a mortgage with no savings, two children, and credit card debt that we were having trouble paying off. And then a year later we had our third child.

Dan’s job paid him well, for a youth pastor, but having a family of five can be expensive and we didn’t have a budget that we kept to, so our debt continued. It got to the point that we had to use a debt consolidation agency for 6 months. This was a rough patch in our marriage. Dan is the free spirit in our marriage and I am the nerd. Dan’s love language is gift giving and he likes buying things that would be fun. Those things aren’t bad, but it caused tension when he would come home with a new movie or game or some new toy and we hadn’t talked it over first.

Another Move

After being in California for about 6 years, God was leading Dan to a different position, we just didn’t know what that looked like. He interviewed at many places, but nothing seemed to work out. The church kept Dan on until the end of summer and then we were on our own. Our oldest son, Alec was 6 at the time, Zach was 4, and our daughter, Emma, was 2. We readied our house to be put on the market at the end of August, and the house sold two weeks later. At the time we didn’t know how much of a blessing selling our house would be during a time when real estate was a sellers market. We were able to use the profit to pay off the rest of our credit cards and other debt we had. The problem was that we didn’t have a place to live. I never realized what a terrible feeling that was not having a place to call your own.

My parents knew of our situation and offered to let us live with them. Before we left, we had a garage sale and sold our bedroom furniture, couch, entertainment center, and one of our cars and headed back to Washington State. My husband, myself, and our three kids moved into my parents house where I grew up, and many of our possessions went into storage. This season would last longer than either of us expected.