As a kid, I was really good at climbing trees. I loved hopping up, limb by limb, until I found a nice little place to perch myself. It was so exciting, so adventurous, so dangerous. I loved it!
But, what I wasn't really good at was getting down from trees. I remember - time after time - climbing up a tree, only to beg for someone to get me down. One time, my dad just kept telling me I'd have to jump! I was crying and so upset that he wouldn't climb up there and get me down! But, he said, "You figured your way up there, now you need to figure your way down."
And, ladies and gentlemen, that is exactly where I find myself today. I've climbed up a tree (this time, with my husband!) and I so desperately want someone to come and rescue us! But, as my dad said... we got ourselves up here, now we need to find our way down.
The tree we've climbed is one that many young Americans face - student loan debt.
Just thinking about being in debt makes my stomach sick! Yet, here we are, weighed down after five years of marriage in yucky, stinky, slimy student loan debt.
Our Debt Story
Without going into too much detail, I took entirely "too long" to graduate from college. I really didn't have a direction in life when I graduated high school, so I spent my first three years just... hopping from one major to another. Then, in what should have been my senior year, my dad passed away unexpectedly. I moved home from college and took some time off. I finally got the wind in my sails and started at The University of Alabama in January 2009. I graduated in May 2011. For those last two and a half years, I had to take out loans to pay for my tuition + living expenses. I did work part-time up until my final internship (where I worked full-time for free, yay!), but it wasn't enough to cover all of my expenses.
When Blake and I met in March 2010, I really wasn't thinking about how my debt would eventually effect my husband or family. I just assumed we'd be able to pay it off like everyone else. Didn't most people have student loan debt? It's the best kind of debt you can have! It's like investing in yourself! I listened to a lot of lies. While the debt was somewhat necessary, I wrote it off and didn't take it seriously. I took out way more than I needed. But, we tried not to worry, because we'd both have good paying jobs and would pay it off quickly.
Except... we didn't. I was only on a one-year contract that first school year (I was an elementary teacher). I was paid well, but there was no guarantees for the next school year. And then, after being married just under a year, we found out we were pregnant (!!!!). To say it was unexpected is an understatement. To be honest, I cried a lot during the first weeks because we weren't financially ready to have a baby. I didn't know how things would work out. To pay for some of our expenses, we started taking out loans for Blake - something we said we would never do.
We managed to stay afloat, trying to only use the loans for necessities. But often finding ourselves making up excuses to use the money. We really tried to use it wisely, but hindsight is 20/20, right? I look back now and see so many more ways we could have cut costs.
In 2015, we found out we were expecting Baby #2! Except this time, we were REALLY EXCITED because we FINALLY had our finances in order! We were at the point where, even with a new baby, we were not going to need any more student loans! We weren't going to be able to pay on them as aggressively as we wanted, but we were financially prepared! Until... we found out the amazing rental arrangement we had was going to end two years sooner than expected. We had to move and, unfortunately, our rent nearly doubled - which sent us into crisis mode.
And then, just a month after moving into our new rental house, my step-dad died suddenly. Had we waited just one more month to move, we could have easily moved to my mom's house to help take care of her and the house. And our rent issue would have been solved. But, that's just now how it worked out.
And then, just a couple of weeks after our second baby girl was born in September 2015, we got some more unexpected news - Blake wasn't going to be graduating in May 2016, which meant we weren't going to be moving and getting two full-time jobs in the fall of 2016, which meant we were going to have to take on more debt to stay afloat.
Fast-forward to now... I'm not quite ready to share the Big Fat Number just yet. Honestly, I hadn't even added it all up until last Friday. I didn't want to know. My thought has always been to take out the minimum of what we might need and that we would "worry about it later". But, we are in for one more year of grad school and we can't postpone the worrying anymore. We have got to get our act together - not just for ourselves, but for our little girls. They are counting on us. And, while we are doing well in so many ways... this is the one area where we are really struggling.
We've gotten ourselves into this mess, and we're going to find our way out.
