Debt free expert advise – and why I’m qualified to give it!

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I love reading articles written by well-meaning journalists and lifestyle guru’s about the evil’s of debt and the pitfalls to be avoided but I often wonder – what qualifications do they have to be giving this advice?

My first attempt at blogging was from my little site “It just makes cents” but I wasn’t really getting very far with it, which is why I joined Wealthy Affiliate.com. In just a short few weeks I have come so much farther than I ever thought possible but, back to my original question: What qualifications Do I Have that you should believe what I say and follow my advice? 

DISCLAIMER: this content has previously been published on my original site “It Just Makes Cents”.

Here is the start of my story:-

Dark Skies and Stormy waters..

One cold winter’s day my husband and I found ourselves unemployed.. At the same time.. In the same week. One week earlier we were grossing over $136,000 a year but we were $88,000 in debt – and that didn’t even include the mortgage! Cue sirens, panic stations and a war party convened, complete with lawyers and Human rights.

We activated insurances on credit cards, mortgages, loans – you name it. We had insurance coverage for everything so, we would be OK, right?   Ha! – no silly. That’s not how it works.

What we later came to discover is that, despite our very grown up, sensible decisions to always take insurance on our debt / products, when the proverbial s.h.i.t. does hit the fan, most often than not these same insurances are woefully inadequate.

Take the Mortgage insurance for example:

We paid approximately $45 every two weeks for 8 years. That would be $9360 in total. When it came time to activate insurance (in the case of this emergency) – they paid the premium for 6 months but actually only cleared the interest portion with the principal being added to the end balance. Had we simply saved this premium in a separate account we could have covered 9 months of principal plus interest. Lesson learned.

We are normally very level-headed people the hubster and I, but I do have a bit of an addictive personality. This essentially means I’m a bit Faddy. New fad comes along I’m totally in to it for about a month and then I’m over it. Just. Like. That.

My fads from the prior three years included, couponing, DIY bath salts and bath bombs, first edition books, shoes, coins and doomsday preppers. Quite eclectic you may notice.

As it turns out these fads probably saved us. You see – between couponing (which doesn’t actually work very well in Canada) and building a preppers stockpile in case of Earthquakes (I do live right on top of a subduction zone) or, you know, zombies; I had actually managed to build a pantry that served us well for over a year. When discussing this with my besties one turned around and said “Wait. What? You actually have a years worth of s.h.i.t tickets stockpiled in a cupboard?”

When you put it like that it’s not half as sexy as I envisaged it but, yes. I have a years supply of toilet rolls, and shampoo, and ladies sanitary products, and laundry detergent, and….

Let me tell you – to be able to go “five-finger shopping” in the storage shed a few times a month really took the pressure off.

What I also had was knowledge. Books are an awesome resource, let me tell ya. Preppers Pantry, Cooking from Scratch, Make your own bath products, Canning 101. Sure saved our asses!

 

I’d like to go a little more into detail in each of these categories as we move through this journey together so, that’s all on these subjects for now.

 

Annus Horribilis (Latin) – Our Worst Year Ever!

In the preceding year to our lay-offs my husbands health had been in the toilet and things were only getting worse.

At 51, he had two minis strokes (T.I.A’s) that left him partially immobile down the left side. We discovered that his heart stopped every night courtesy of a small defect hidden by a lifetime of extremely high blood pressure, on top of this he also had very severe sleep apnea (he stops breathing approx 88 times an hour on average for more than 10 seconds).

He was fitted with a pacemaker and started on CPAP therapy so you can imagine what a bundle of joy he was to be around back then. Things between us were very strained and I actually considered ending my marriage.

After we lost our jobs, instead of getting worse – things between us got vastly better. We are a formidable team and, when the chips are down we close ranks and prepare to fight. After only a few weeks I was hired by a small local company through mutual connections from the kids school and friends. This little local company looked at my vastly over qualified resume and then threw it out of the proverbial window and started training me to be a part of their team. I’ll always be eternally grateful for that day (and I have to say – although I no longer work for them, the Owner and his family are like a little extended family to me today).

We made the hard decision to leave Drew at home to get better – something he had been denying himself for over a year f

or the sake of the job. For the first time in my adult life I found myself getting home by 5:00pm every night whereas previously it had been 7 days a week and sometimes 12 hours a day. We got to know our kids again and started to enjoy them instead of worrying about how they were getting on with two absent parents.

Budgeting became our number one focus and, even though we had activated all of our insurance policies, we soon came to the conclusion that some bills just couldn’t be paid on time anymore.. not if we wanted to eat and so began the game of paying one company on time one month but late the next month.

Then the Insurances ran out.

And The Phone Calls Started….

 

XO

Anna