We walked through the tall grass, stopping occasionally, to turn and face the highway.

“Here?”

“No, further back?”

“How far are you going to go?”

“Far. I want to be as far as I can get from the highway.”

The land, deeded to us from my grandparents would be collateral for our loan. It was right next to my mom’s house and on a busy highway. It was not exactly the place I had imagined my house would be, but it was growing on me.

In the fall, I planted trees all around our house site. The land, formerly a garden, seemed too open, bare. In our 8 years of renting at the end of a dirt road, I had become accustomed to life in the woods, the sound of the whippoorwill at night and isolation.

At night, after the girls were tucked bed, I sat at the dining room table of our rented house drawing and re-drawing our plans. My uncle, our contractor, had given us an estimate for what it would cost per square foot. We analyzed, figured, added and subtracted and decided we could spend $100,000 on this house and be able to make the monthly payment.

I kept my calculator, ruler and pencil close by as I erased square footage and tried very hard to see into the future.

Three bedrooms, big closets, a small office and a front porch were staying, but feet were getting cut with each drawing.

I kept a small picture in my wallet of the outside of the house and spent many hours daydreaming about what each room would look like. I imagined built-in bookshelves in the hallway, a closet big enough to walk into.

Finally we had a plan and a loan. We broke ground and watched our paper dreams become three dimensional. We spent evenings watching the girls run across the foundation which felt indefinitely stalled.

And then there were walls and more decisions.

At the end, I painted all the walls and my uncle laid wood floor for free when we ran out of money. We moved in March of 2003 and signed the papers for our mortgage, $30,000 over budget for 20 years.

We settled in, spread out and were able to make our monthly payment as well as begin paying off some credit cards. It felt like we were on the right track. I had visions of being debt free, including our house, in ten years.

Then one morning I got a phone call. My husband had been in a car accident on his way to work. What happened next would change all my plans.

Read more of this series: Our Financial Journey.

1993

“Would you like to save 10% today on your purchases by opening up a credit card with us,” the sales lady asked me as she began to ring up my purchases.

I looked at my pile of carefully chosen sale items on the counter. 10% more would help. These clothes were just a few things to get me started in my new job. I would be teaching. I had to look a little more professional than I had while working at USA Drug all summer in jeans and a T-shirt.

Sure my parents had always told us how they had put every penny of my mom’s salary in a savings account while they lived off my dad’s income. Because of that sacrifice, they eventually built a house using their savings almost entirely debt free. It sounded like a great idea, and something I was definitely intending to do, but just this first paycheck, I needed some new clothes.

We had just made it through a tight three years in college. Doing part-time work and eating bologna sandwiches got us through, but now it was a new chapter. Instead of keeping a frugal lifestyle and putting back money for a house while making 6 times what we made the previous years, we were buying things we felt we deserved after all that hard work.

We’d already purchased a second vehicle a few months earlier when my husband got a full-time job. He wasn’t making a ton of money, just entry level pay, but it was a lot more than we had seen in our whole married life. We found a used Toyota Corolla and we signed up for our first debt with low monthly payments.

In our marriage I was the saver. Big purchases, like cars, scared me and I tended to avoid them altogether. I still had the $1500 I had squirreled away from our college days safely in a CD in the bank. It made me feel safe to have that cushion.

That said, I was no stranger to credit card use. Once I saved that first 10%, credit cards seemed like a good idea. I never overcharged on them and always made sure I could pay the balance each month, so I felt like I was using the system. What I didn’t realize was the system was using me and I was always living one month behind. I felt sick each month when I opened a bill that I had forgotten all about. The clothes no longer seemed new, and paying for them after the fact didn’t give me the same thrill as the initial purchase.

We were renting a relative’s house for a small amount of money. We had one car payment. We could have really been putting back some cash. Instead, our old car from college starting having problems. It was going to cost us to get it repaired and I needed a vehicle to get to my new job. My husband’s initial response to car repair was to buy a new one. I wasn’t convinced. I knew two car payments would stretch us to the limit.

Eventually, I got on board. I’m not sure if it was the new car smell or the idea of picking out my own vehicle for the first time in my life, but I cashed in my $1500 CD to make a down payment on a green Ford Explorer and came home with a $350 car payment that took away a quarter of my monthly income.

We would eventually pay off that vehicle and drive it for 130,000 miles. I would also decide to go back to school for my master’s degree and take out a student loan for $5000. I would decide teach part-time at the junior high, teach Freshman Composition in exchange for my tuition and have a short-lived job at UPS writing a newsletter. At the same time, my husband was moving up in his company and increasing his income.

We were doing what we needed to do to meet our needs, but not making any long-term goals. We thought we might build a house some day, but we weren’t saving for that. Instead, I was buying furniture on payment plans with 0 % interest. Everything we managed to pay off was just an excuse for us to buy more. We were in a cycle of spend, spend, spend.