I’m not quite sure how this happened… but grace and redemption are, for sure, part of the story.
My dad is a financial genius. He is a dedicated dairy farmer, so it’s not like he’s got a lucrative profession. But somehow, through thirty-plus years, there was always enough, even for the unrelenting medical bills (all but one of the family got chronic Lyme disease over a period of fifteen years, a grueling and expensive experience).
Unusual for that time and place, my parents openly discussed finances around us kids. We knew the kind of work and thought it took to manage a business with razor thin margins and high operating costs and absorbed many basic money principles just by overhearing discussions with accountants, consultants, and bankers.
Given that kind of foundation, you would think that “money stuff” would come easy for me. And for quite a few years, it seemed that it did. I had ten thousand in the bank when I enrolled in college, and I worked crazy hours all the way through to offset expenses as much as possible. I collected impressive amounts of scholarship money, and graduated debt free. I thought, smugly, that my peers just didn’t have it quite as together. I felt sorry for them, without the advantages of a good solid Mennonite upbringing.
But then. I hit rock bottom, and in desperation, admitted that I couldn’t handle the emotional pain I’d been living with for decades.
Life fell apart. In the process of finally addressing unresolved trauma and abuse, I lost family relationships, friends, church, community, and my debt-free status.
It’s now over three years since the fateful day when I began to allow God to do the undoing and healing process. And of the many things I’ve learned in that time, perhaps the most unexpected has to do with finances.
My dad is a financial genius. The things he does, are intuitive. He loves to run his business account with cushion of a hundred dollars or less, but somehow he calculates so well that the debit card is never declined. And while he taught us kids a lot more than average, you can’t teach things that you can’t explain. It’s taken me a long time to understand some of what he was doing when he scribbled out an intricate and perfectly balanced budget on a sheet of lined notebook paper.
He taught me so much, and it’s been invaluable. One of the griefs that been hardest to grapple with, was realizing that he didn’t teach me enough. But one day, I stopped deluding myself, and looked the facts squarely in the face.
I had credit cards and had run a cumulative balance in the thousands for several years. Thanks to zero interest introductory offers, and low-cost balance transfers, it wasn’t costing me much. But the balance had stayed pretty much the same for months, and it seemed that I couldn’t make headway.
I finally admitted that I had a problem, and cautiously confessed these facts to a few trusted friends. Then I got serious about getting out of debt. Dave Ramsey’s videos, including the “Baby Steps” plan, filled in a few crucial pieces of practical knowledge that had been missing. I actually have a working budget, for the first time in my life. And the debt began to decrease. A hundred here, and five hundred there. Another balance transfer to keep from incurring interest.
Finally, I was down to the final thousand. Then the power steering went out on my car. The repair meant replacing the entire steering column and took out my emergency fund. The day after I put the car in the shop, the shutdown hit. My income abruptly dropped by more than half, with no emergency fund.
What happened next is sheer grace. A few days working in a farm store. A housecleaning job there. Babysitting. And generous, astounding, utterly unexpected financial gifts. A new client that is in all ways better than the ones I lost.
Two and half months later, and six weeks behind my carefully plotted schedule, that last thousand has been paid. My cumulative credit limit increased by approximately $1,500 (even during the pandemic skittishness), and my credit score topped 800 for the first time ever.
I’m less confident in my own abilities than perhaps I’ve ever been, and better equipped. And that, too, is grace.
Postscript: If you’d rather a book, one of the better known of Dave Ramsey’s books is The Total Money Makeover. (That is an affiliate link: If you use it, I get a few cents, and the cost to you stays the same.)