Our Financial Journey: The first year

May 1990

I was puzzled. I had watched my mother make mashed potatoes plenty of times. I knew what went into them, so why were the ones we were trying to eat the consistency of glue? We didn’t have a lot of food to waste, but in spite of my new husband’s gallant effort to choke them down, I was putting mine straight in the trash.

Making mashed potatoes wasn’t the only thing I had to learn that year.

We were both in college and working part time jobs too. He was 19, I was 20 and maybe we had no business being married. We certainly had no idea what we were doing.

Our apartment on campus cost us $100 per month. We paid for a semester’s worth of rent out of our Pell Grants. We bought groceries, gas and anything else we needed out of the around $600 per month we made at jobs we had on campus.

Our 1990 tax return shows that we made $4,939 (from May to December) and yet amazingly we had no debt. At the time, we didn’t realize we made enough money to have debt. We bought our first computer with Pell Grant funds. I also had saved $1500 by the time we graduated from college with no student loans. (Both our tuitions were paid with Rehab scholarships.)

All our furniture was second hand, mostly give-aways from my family. We ate fried bologna sandwiches for lunch every day while we watched All My Children between classes. We shared one car.

These first three years were the most frugal we would be our entire marriage. Once we graduated and got jobs we also got debt.

I often look back at this time and marvel at how little money you can live on when you have no debt. It should have been a great learning experience for us, instead we saw that way of life as something temporary. Once we had jobs, we thought, everything would change.

And it did.