We have a confession to make. When we first created this blog, we told you an “alternative facts” version of how our financial journey truly started.

We did, in fact, have a conversation about paying too much for cable. But, that wasn’t the main reason that caused us to reevaluate our entire financial picture. It also wasn’t what helped us clear out $117,000 worth of debt. The actual reason involves a much more personal story, and at the time I wasn’t quite ready to share it.

Dannie recently reminded me of the promise we made when we started this blog. We said that we would always try to remain transparent and honest with our readers. We believe that is what would ultimately have the most positive impact.

Given this fact, I need to tell the whole story about how our financial journey truly started…

*If you struggle with suicide & depression, this post may contain potential triggers. Please continue reading with caution*

Expect The Unexpected

In 2015, I received a phone call that shattered everything that I held close to my heart. Unbeknownst to me, my mother had been struggling with mental health issues. On this particular day, she settled on the decision to take her own life in my childhood home.

This is not news that anyone ever expects to hear. And it’s definitely not something anyone prepares for in advance.

I don’t remember the rest of the conversation or much of what happened immediately after I hung up the phone. I just remember wondering, “How am I going to get home?” Dannie and I currently live in Northern California but we’re both from North Carolina. These states are more than 3,000 miles away from each other.

In a moment like this, money should have been the last thing on my mind. Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite the case. All of a sudden, I needed to figure out how I was going to find the money for 2 plane tickets, a rental car and a place to stay.

I logged into our bank account and saw:

Account Balance: ~$200

Two.

Hundred.

Dollars.

For perspective, one round-trip plane ticket was about $600 at the time – and we needed TWO of them. So, simply getting home was going to cost us 6 times more than what we actually had in our bank account at the moment. Credit cards were out of the question because they were already nearly maxed-out on God-knows-what.

Cue: second mental breakdown.

Asking For Help

I didn’t know what we were going to do. At the time, we were a single-income family living on a low-rank military salary. Needless to say, there wasn’t much money coming in to help solve the problem that we were now facing.

We ended up reaching out to some of my leadership at work and they helped us take out a special loan that is available to military members. We used this to cover the costs of our plane tickets and rental car with the understanding that the monthly repayment amount would be taken out of my paychecks automatically to repay the loan in full within 12 months. The only good thing about this loan was that it wouldn’t accumulate any interest while it was being repaid.

At this point, I should have been relieved because we were actually able to book plane tickets and a rental car.

Not quite.

There was yet another money-related problem that I had to deal with:

There was NO life insurance or plan in place to cover my mom’s death.

This was a fact that I just could not wrap my mind around. Both of my parents had been working for almost 30 years. Where did their money go? How was it that no one knew how the funeral would be paid for? Why wasn’t there any life insurance in place?

WHERE. WAS. THEIR. MONEY?!

For me, this was a terrifying realization. I already had to worry about burying my mother. Now, I also had to worry about whether or not we’d even be able to AFFORD to bury my mother.

To make matters worse, I was using my GI Bill to complete an MBA at the time, but due to the circumstances, I had to withdraw from the semester. That meant I would now be responsible for repaying the almost $3,000 that had already been dispersed for my education costs.

If that wasn’t enough, Dannie was planning to leave to go back to school the very next day. The school was in another state and she had already secured an apartment. In order to get out of the lease, she had to pay cancellation fees and 1 month’s rent – which came out to about $2,500 that we obviously didn’t have.

It seemed like things continued to get worse by the second.

Eventually, I ended up doing what many others do in this situation and turned to GoFundMe to ask for help. Luckily for us, there were a few people that were kind enough to send donations and I will always be thankful for their help. Within a few hours, the GoFundMe page went viral. People began sharing the page with their friends and donations started to come in from all over the place. This should have been great news, but it actually turned out to be more of a burden than a blessing (more on that later).

But even with that help, we still had a BIG financial mess to deal with…

Starting Our Financial Journey

When we returned home, we KNEW that change was necessary. We never wanted to experience the feeling of being helpless due to a lack of money ever again.

And we also realized that we didn’t want to spend our entire lives working only to realize that we never achieved any type of financial independence along the way.

In order to get ourselves on the right track, we had to assess our current financial situation and start working on a solid plan for our financial journey. This is when we realized just how much debt we were actually in. We also realized how much money we were wasting on expenses that weren’t truly necessary. This forced us to create a strict monthly budget that we felt would help get us on a path towards financial stability.

We spent a lot of time seeking out personal finance information from various “experts” (like Suze Orman & Dave Ramsey) and that helped us create a “Basic” plan that would ultimately help us clear out $130,912 worth of debt.

***

I really hate that my mother’s death had to be the catalyst for our financial journey, but I am thankful that we’re able to share our experiences to help other people with their journeys.

What spurred your financial journey? How did you get where you are today?

— Dj