My name is Derek. (That’s me doing my daughters hair.)
When Carrie and I first got married we did a short sale on the house she brought into the marriage.
Fun times. NOT!
It cost us $18,000 to make the house-nightmare go away.
Here’s the interesting thing…
Losing the money wasn’t the hard part. It was how it made me feel that I’ll never forget.
I had anxiety for months after it was all over every time I checked the mailbox. I was too used to getting nothing but bad news.
I remember being terrified that the local Sheriff was going to bang on the door and slap handcuffs on me.
I could care less about the money, I just never what to feel that way again!
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A silver lining
Although I would never recommend volunteering for a short sale (That’s like volunteering to get punched in the face everyday for a year!) we actually came out the other end stronger in some ways.
Even to this day our relationship is better because of what we went through. I know, crazy… but true.
You see, we had to work together to fight off the foreclosure.
Thankfully we were a pretty good team and worked well together. We decided not to blame each other or argue but chose to focus all our energy towards fighting our common enemy.
We had daily meetings to work on our strategy. It was like we were fighting a war and it was just the two of us against the world.
We found ourselves in a high-level situation from day one of our marriage. (Carrie had been fighting the foreclosure on her own before we got married.)
I often describe it as a lifetime’s worth of money talks crammed into the first year of our marriage.
Because we went through such an intense situation so early in our marriage it’s made the usual bumps in the road feel a lot smaller. They aren’t actually smaller, we’ve just been through so much together that they are easily dealt with.
Our ability to communicate well with each other is stronger.
Our trust in each other is stronger.
Our loyalty to each other is stronger.
That was 2010. We basically started over.
We started a monthly budget that changed everything!
We started learning more about how to properly handle money.
We feel much better now that we’ve got a handle on our money.
Join us!
You can start today and feel a thousand times better before you get in bed tonight.
Carrie and I share our experiences and what we are learning about money here, on our podcast, and in the Facebook group.
We’ve got a growing community and I’d love for you to join us.
Join the Facebook group. Monthly Money Challenges you’ll love participating in!
Subscribe to the podcast. Loads of fun. We learn stuff every now and then too!
Email me for any reason. derek AT how do i money DOT com
-Derek