Our Financial Journey

“If you want what normal people have, do what normal people do. If you want what few people have, do what few people do.”  

- Dave Ramsey

I think the hardest part to prepare for was the financial burden that this decision can bring. 

Looking back on this, it is amazing to realize that God has been preparing us for this challenge over the past couple years.  In June of 2005, we had moved in to a beautiful two-bedroom, three bath townhome in Mokena.  We figured we were going to live there for at least 7 years…at least that is what we said J We were blessed with Graham in August of 2007 and were completely blown away with how amazing parenthood was. In April 2008, Danny and I started talking about having another child which would mean, we would need more space.  So in May, we put our home up for sale, had a contract by the end of June, and moved out the last weekend of July.  It went so fast that we didn’t have time to find our home!  We moved in on with my parents and brother in their two bedroom townhouse in Park Forest.  We quickly found a five bedroom, three bath fixer-upper in Frankfort with a price we could afford.  We were ecstatic and started planning how we were going to turn this house into our forever home.

Two months later, Danny started losing hours at work.  By November, Danny had his hours drastically cut.  In December, Danny worked 40 hours for the whole month!  With the New Year came no hours and in the second week of February, Danny filed for unemployment for the first time.  Two days before we would have received his first check, Danny got a call to work.  He worked 4 hours that day and he was back to waiting for work.  He applied for unemployment for the second time and he was told he needed to start his two week waiting week again because he only waited for 8 business days before.  Danny received his first unemployment check the beginning of March.  By this time, we had been living off of savings for the past 4 months because we kept hearing from the union that “you should be working again soon.”  We knew that something needed to change…fast! 

We started looking, back in December, for advice that was going to teach us how to fix the mess we were in.  Mess doesn’t define it…we were drowning.  We had over $30,000 in debt and a house that was now eating up 48% of my take-home pay.  We were in a lot of trouble and knew that if we didn’t change something now, we weren’t going to have a home or cars to worry about.  We starting with reading the Money Map in January 2009 and got an idea about important financial decisions that we needed to start making.  We quickly learned that reading about those steps was the easy part…actually doing them I thought was going to kill us!  Trying to track our spending for one month…took us three months to complete!  The next step was to create a budget…that wasn’t hard but sticking to that budget was.  The amount of fighting was insane.  Needless to say, we didn’t make it on that plan. 

In March 2009, my friend introduced me to a book called “The Total Money Makeover” by Dave Ramsey.  She knew we were having problems with the plan we were on.  I ended up renting it from our school library and we read it over the spring break.  We started talking about Dave Ramsey’s very simple baby steps to financial freedom and we recruited my brother and his wife to join us on this adventure.  In April we started with tracking our money and in May started our envelope system.  It wasn’t easy but having other people to go through it with, made a huge difference.  We got “gazelle intense.”  We downsized ANY additional spending so that we could take that extra money and roll it into our debt snowball.  What we did over the next year was truly amazing.  We left $1,000 in our savings account (which is also referred to as an emergency fund) and put every dollar above and beyond that into our smallest debt.  Over the next 11 months, that debt snowball rolled fast!  Was it easy?  NO!  During that time, we bought no clothes, we downsized our satellite service ($62.29) to the basic channels ($16.04 a month), decreased our eating out money to $100 a month, reduced our fun money to $30 a month, researched lower insurance premiums for our house and cars (saved over $500 in that year), and traded in our leased 2007 Honda CRV for a car that as half the price. 

Now, as many people have experienced at some point, when you start making the right choices, there is always setbacks.  Our big setback was in October of 2009.  In August of 2009, we had paid off Danny’s car and moved our coverage to liability.  In October, our car rear ended another car and it was totaled.  That car was towed back to our house and sat in our driveway for months until we could figure out what we could afford to do.  For the next 10 months, Danny and Graham drove me to and from school every week day and to my Graduate classes every Monday night until we could afford to get our vehicle up and running.

In March of 2010, we were able to look at each other and scream “WE ARE DEBT FREE!” That same day, we removed Danny off of unemployment because we no longer needed that money to survive.  

Since then, we have made good financial strides but it is still tough.  We were paying for my second Masters with cash and it was eating up 17% of our household income.  We have started our retirement accounts and Graham’s college savings.  During our research of all of the financial companies, Danny found his calling.  He is now a financial advisor that compliments many of Dave Ramsey’s principles and gets to work with individuals and families that need the same help we were searching for back in November of 2008.  In the field that he is in, he volunteers his time to meet with and guide many families because most of the families that he works with, can’t use his services because they are struggling as much as we were and don’t have the money to invest in their future.

After attending all of the adoption informational meetings, I would be lying if I said that the price tag of adoption didn’t scare me.  I remember looking at Danny and saying, “even if we cleaned out the emergency fund, we still wouldn’t have enough.”  After several conversations and some research, we learned that there were loans that were available for adoption that would lend you up to $20,000 at 9% interest.  Danny and I agreed that “Dave Ramsey wouldn’t approve.”  So that got us thinking…what would Dave Ramsey tell us to do?  So we looked into it.

We logged onto www.daveramsey.com and started reading. I came across the daily summary of one of his shows from earlier in the week and the third topic on the list was a woman that had written a book called “Adopt Without Debt.” Wow…sometimes God is subtle and other times he literally smacks you in the face J

I read the first chapter on Amazon to get a feel for the book.  I was sold immediately, ordered it, and every day came home looking for the box at my front door.  I got so excited when it arrived in the mail that I finished the book 3 hours after it hit my doorstep. I was so inspired.  The family in the book had lived our life; financial struggle, behavior change, setbacks, unemployment, successes, and a desire to bring children into their family through adoption.  Danny and I started talking about which fundraising options we would consider doing and decided that we could handle an adoption benefit garage sale.  We talked with our friends, who were also in the adoption process, to see if they would be interested in joining forces for these fundraising efforts.  They were in.  

Both of our families ransacked our houses to find any items that we could include in our garage sales.  We started telling family and friends what we were doing and before we knew it, the two car garage was full.  We had always known that we were surrounded by amazing people but it was amazing to see how the people around us stepped up for us. 

We started brainstorming when, where, and how we were going to step up and run this garage sale.  We knew with the cold weather approaching, that we were going to need to move quickly.  One of the first ideas I put out there was a church sale that I had been a part of in March.  This church would allow anyone to sign up, with paying a registration fee, would secure a spot as a seller in the resale event.  I emailed the coordinator to see if she would consider allowing us to bring items to their resale event. It took two weeks to hear back from the coordinator but the news was well worth the wait.  She had discussed our situation with the principal and they waived our registration fee and lowered the percentage of fundraising that they earn from the items bought at the sale.  I was speechless and extremely grateful.  They did not have to do that for us and they did.  Absolutely amazing! 

The work that ended up going into preparing for this sale was intense.  Since there was over 70 sellers in this resale event, each item that was brought to this sale needed to have a tag that included the seller’s name, seller’s number, and description of the item, size, and price.  There were countless hours that were put in by both of the families and within two weeks, we had labeled enough items to fill a moving truck.  Even though the shopper turnout was much lower than in years past, we ended up bringing home enough to pay for our application and one of our adoption classes!

Now we had another major decision to make.  We were hosting an adoption benefit garage sale at our house in six days!  Were we going to keep the items that were tagged priced or remove the tags to allow the shopper to tell us what they wanted to pay for the items they were interested in?  We went back and forth but decided to follow the guidance that was given in the Adopt Without Debt book.  We removed all of the tags and prepared ourselves for the negotiations that were going to occur. 

During those six days in-between the sales, we continued to see the people around us step up to our needs.  Our church showed their support by allowing us to use 7 massive tables for our sale which made a world of a difference.  On Friday morning, we had a packed two car garage full of donations and a hard working volunteer (Thanks again Chris J) to help us that first morning.  It took us over 4 hours to carry out all of the boxes and load the tables up with as many items as possible. 


                       
We had boxes and boxes of items stacked up under and next to the tables.  We had massive amounts of people stopping by to shop our sale and to ask questions. 

Of course we had people show up that were just shopping to score a deal.  But other individuals completely blew our mind.  We had many people just offer donations and several others pay much more than what the items were worth because it was going to a good cause. 

At the end of the day, it took us almost 3 hours to get everything packed up and back in the garage.  At the end of Day 1, we had raised enough to pay for our second class!  We were amazed!!  And exhausted.  We got up the next morning to do it all again.  We decided while unpacking that we needed to move more items because we still couldn’t unpack all of the boxes because there was not enough room to display it!  So…we sold grocery bags of items for $5 and boxes for $10.  We moved a TON of items and continued to meet tons of people that would share their adoption stories or their struggles.  At the end of Day 2, we saw that we had sold a ton of donations.  We were amazed to learn that we had raised more money selling bags and boxes than when individuals were bidding on items.

We still had enough items remaining that half of the garage was still full of items.  We decided to host another garage sale two weeks later.  With the weather shift and incredible winds, we were not nearly as successful that weekend.  We decided that it was time to donate these incredible gifts to another cause to allow God’s work to be done with the generosity of our loved ones.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

This was one of the most mind blowing experiences I have experienced when it has come to asking for help.  I was raised to take care of you and not to burden others.  I learned that if you allow others to help you, you get to allow God to show you amazing opportunities. 

So here we are.  We are following God’s lead right now.  We just finished our home study and God has continued to guide us in this process.  Keep your eyes on our page…we will be sharing more information very shortly J