15 years ago, my husband and I got married and set an audacious goal for him to go through law school debt-free. They said we couldn't do it, but we lived on $12,000 a year, beans & rice, and faith.
I wrote about this time period in a post in 2009:
Before my husband and I got married, we sat down and did a lot of calculating to see how little we could survive on. Our goal was to make it through Jesse’s six remaining months of undergrad and the following three years of law year without going into debt.
We had the money saved up and set aside to pay for school, but we didn’t have much more beyond that. We figured that if he worked part-time and I worked part-time, we could manage to make close to $1000 per month.
So that was the dollar amount we had to work with in making our budget. Considering that our rent ate up over half of that amount, we had around $125/week leftover to work with.
It seemed rather daunting to be able to pay for our utilities, transportation, food, and living expenses with that amount but we were determined to make it work. We knew we would have much more freedom if we weren’t making payments on law school loans for years to come.
And we knew if Jesse were to begin his legal career without the bondage of debt, it would give us much more of a foundation for achieving our long-term goals of owning a home debt-free, owning real estate debt-free, and being able to share abundantly with those in need.
Yes, we had some pretty big long-term goals from the get-go, and the only way to achieve those was by making short-term sacrifices. It would mean going without, saying “no”, and exercising lots of self-discipline. In short, it would mean experiencing some temporary discomforts in order to reap lifelong rewards.
The temporary discomforts during the law school years weren’t always easy, believe me. Both of us had moments when we just wanted to throw in the towel and throw our arms up in defeat.
There were many times when we wished we could spend money on this or that or enjoy some of the little luxuries in life it seemed everyone else was. But we plodded on and on and on–wearing the same clothes over and over, driving an old car, brown-bagging it, clipping coupons, forgoing dinners out, living in a cramped little basement apartment, and so on–constantly reminding ourselves that it would someday be worth it.
And it has been every bit worth it. The little luxuries in life that we gave up–like eating out, making fancy meals, buying new clothes or things, driving a nicer car–pale in comparison to the freedom we now have living a life without payments.
By the grace of God, we did it — Jesse graduated from law school and we had zero debt of any kind!
We were so inspired and motivated by this success that, 11 years ago, we set another audacious goal. This time, the crazy goal was to pay cash (100% down) for a house.
I wrote more about this over on Get Rich Slowly:
We crunched a bunch of numbers and realized that, if we continued to live simply and frugally and worked hard to bring in extra money through side jobs, we could save enough over the course of five years to pay cash for a starter home.
It felt like a mammoth goal and we weren't sure if we could do it, but we decided to go for it anyway. We figured that, even if we didn't make our goal in five years, we'd at least be a lot closer to it than if we didn't try at all!
Plus, from our calculations, we'd be in a lot better position to wait to buy — even if it took seven years to save up enough for a house — than if we were to go ahead and get 15-year mortgage and pay it off early.
We knew that we could buy a decent starter home in the area {Wichita, KS} where we were planning to move for around $100,000 to $110,000, so we divided $100,000 by 60 (since there are sixty months in five years) and set a goal to save $1700 every month. Because we didn't have any debt or school loans, and because we lived simply and frugally, we were able to live on significantly less than we were making, thus freeing up a good chunk of money to put towards our house savings each month.
Once we set this goal and I blogged about it publicly, we were incredibly motivated to work as hard as we could and delay every purchase we could in order to put as much as possible into our house savings fund.
We used coupons, ate a lot of meatless meals, shopped at thrift stores, cooked from scratch, brown bagged it, continued to use our old and worn-down furniture, didn't replace anything that wasn't an absolute necessity, limited our going out to eat, only had one car, stayed home a lot, used gift cards from Swagbucks to buy any non-necessities, bought eye glasses from Zenni optical, learned to be content with what we had, and continued to live on a strict written budget.
Meanwhile, we also looked for ways to increase our income. I blogged, wrote ebooks, and took on freelance writing jobs. My husband did contract work, started his own law firm, and helped me running the blogging business.
That first year, we didn't always make our monthly savings goals. We had some unexpected medical bills and car problems that ate up a portion of our savings. But we kept plugging away, throwing whatever extra we could squeeze out of our income toward savings.
The few years of long hours and hard work I’d put into blogging previously started to really pay big dividends and by the second year, we were meeting and exceeding our monthly savings goals every single month.
As our house savings fund increased, we began to get so excited that we kind of went overboard and worked long, long hours in order to meet our savings goal even faster. I wouldn't recommend putting in such long hours, missing so many social events, or sleeping so little, but the effort paid off because, at the end of two and a half years, we had met and exceeded our savings goal!
While our initial goal was to save $100K, as our income through blogging significantly increased and we continued to be able to live on around $30K per year (which felt like a BIG step up from the $12K per year we had been living on during law school!), we decided to up our savings goal to $150K.
By the time we actually bought our first house (it took us a number of months to find the “perfect” house), we had around $200K in our house savings! We never, ever dreamed that this would have been possible… especially back in those lean law school days when we were barely eeking by. But as we discovered, hard work, sacrifice, and being intentional with your finances pays off in big ways over time!
(You can read our entire story of our journey to pay cash for our first house here.)
After we paid cash for our first house, we continued on with the same mindset — living on significantly less than we made and using the extra income to give generously and save aggressively. We decided to invest in real estate and pour back into our blogging business.
We ended up buying two rental homes with cash over the next few years. Both of these became almost instant money-makers for us since we didn’t have to pay out mortgages on them and they stayed rented almost 100% of the time.
We also invested a lot back into MoneySavingMom.com, shoring up our business Emergency Fund, trying a few different business ventures, spending the capital necessary to build more diverse income streams and have a much stronger team and business infrastructure in place (so that I could work a lot fewer hours than the crazy hours I had previously been working!)
In addition, we were able to give generously to a number of local needs/individuals as well as invest in global issues that matter to us (such as the work we are involved in in South Africa).
In 2014, we made the BIG decision to move from Kansas (where I’d lived for all my life!) to Tennessee. Because we didn’t have debt and we were self-employed, we were able to jump out and take this pretty crazy leap of faith. It didn’t really make sense to us and it definitely didn’t make sense to others, but we felt it in our bones that it was what we were supposed to do.
(Read more about Why We Moved to Nashville here.)
The move has changed our life in so many, many ways. We needed to step outside of our comfort zones and do something pretty radical in order to grow and become healthier. And we’re so grateful — even though it meant going back to being renters again! (Read more about why we chose to rent here in TN.)
We rented out our house in Wichita, KS (the one we had saved up so aggressively to pay cash for) and said we would only commit to Tennessee for 18 months and then we’d re-evaluate. Within 5-6 months, we knew it was supposed to be a long-term home for our family.
So we started talking about what it would look like to buy a house with cash here in TN. Housing prices where we live are much higher than they are in Kansas and it felt like another HUGE goal to set.
We decided to sell all three of our rental houses (the one we had lived in + the two we had purchased as rentals) and then combine that with what we could set aside in savings over the next year or two in order to have enough to pay cash for a house here in TN.
Selling our rentals proved to take quite a bit longer than we had hoped, but they finally all sold and — 3 1/2 years after we moved to TN — we put a contract on a house here.
Y’all, I look around this beautiful paid-for home that we now have moved into here in TN and I feel so overwhelmed by gratitude. It took 15 years of intention, sacrifice, and hard work to get here, but I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat.
Hard work pays off. Sacrifice is worth it. We have zero regrets with our commitment to be “weird” even when it seemed like we were the only ones on this debt-free journey.
We are humbled and grateful for this home that God has provided for us and our heart's desire is to be able to use it as a haven of hospitality for many, many weary souls. We’ve already had the opportunity to welcome multiple people into it for meals or just to hang out and savor good conversation over a cup of tea. We can’t wait to see what opportunities lie ahead as we continue to commit to open our doors.
Many of you have asked for me to share more about this part of our journey. Honestly, I hesitate to share it because our story is not your story. And I don’t ever want to come across as prideful or be hurtful to those of you who are struggling through years of the beans and rice budget.
However, my hope is that this will inspire you — wherever you are in life — that you don't have to listen to the real-life or in-your-head voices that say, "You can never do that!"mWe're living proof that it's possible to prove them wrong!
