What financial health means to me (and my family)

Your financial health has a huge impact on the health of your relationships.

Good financial health can have a positive impact on your relationship.

But can a financial disaster also have a positive impact on your relationship?

When Carrie and I got married in 2010 we were fighting the biggest financial battle of our lives.

Carrie brought a house into the marriage that was already scheduled for foreclosure.

Through a very long (and stressful) series of events we managed to find a buyer and arrange a short sale. Better than a foreclosure, but ouch, it hurt! It hit our bank account pretty hard. ($18k down the drain!)

Not a fun experience, at all. In fact, there was a day when it looked like the house was going to be foreclosed on in spite of all our efforts. I looked at Carrie and said, “This is the worst day of my life.”

I still feel bad about saying that to her. Just imagine how she felt hearing her new husband say that.

We survived.

Bruised, but not broken.

The 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.

Financial health is more than just money

Life is going to throw some punches your way, especially from the finance department.

As much as you plan and as great as your efforts are I can guarantee you’ll experience financial challenges.

Remember that the ups and the downs both present an opportunity to strengthen your relationship. It’s how you react that determines if financial challenges strengthen you or break you.

How about you?

Have you been through any financial struggles that had unexpectedly positive results?

-Derek