Paying Cash for a Home

A Dream Come True: Paying Cash for Our First Home

by Crystal on July 08, 2010

When we walked into this house, we both instantly fell in love with it. It was everything we were looking for — and so much more! Best of all? It was in our price range.

While we both were a little antsy to go ahead and put a contract on it, we wanted to research out everything more thoroughly, think it through, pray about it some more, sleep on it overnight and bring both of our dads to investigate it again with us to make sure we weren’t missing anything which we needed to be aware of.

There were already quite a few showings scheduled, so we felt it was best to not piddle around. We scheduled a time to come back and look at the house the next day with our dads and then we went home to pray and think.

Once home, we researched flood plains, tax appraisals, register of deeds documents, homes in the area which had recently sold and how much they sold for and we spent a long time praying for wisdom. We wanted to be 100% sure God was leading us to put a contract on this home. We really didn’t want to practically clean out our entire bank account for something which was not His will for us!

And the more we researched and prayed, the more the lights turned green. Based upon the prices of comparable houses in the area which had recently sold and based upon what we felt the home was worth, we decided upon what we wanted to offer.

The next day, we went back to look at the home praying that if there was any reason we weren’t supposed to put an offer on the house, God would make it very clear to us. Well, in going through the house with a fine-toothed comb again, we only came to like it even more. And our dads really liked it as well and felt the offer we had decided upon was fair.

So, with great excitement, we signed the contract. And within a few hours, the sellers accepted!

We had a hard time believing it was really and truly for real. After talking, dreaming, working and praying towards the goal of paying cash for a house, it felt rather surreal that it had actually happened.

A few weeks later, we drove Old Blue Van into town and signed our names on the dotted line to become home owners. We were chuckling while driving there about how crazy it was to be driving a clunker to pay cash for a home. We felt a little out of place when we drove up to a parking lot full of shiny almost-new cars.

But, in a way, it seemed so fitting. Being content with a clunker instead of upgrading to a newer car was just one of the many reasons we were in a position to pay cash for a house.

After signing the contract and getting the keys, Jesse and I headed over to our new home. It is hard to describe the feelings which washed over us when we pulled up into the driveway. To see our dreams come to fruition. To see the sleepless nights and long days of working and saving pay off. To see the realization of years of scrimping.

It was far from a fleeting momentary giddiness; it was a deep fulfilling feeling in the bottom of our souls. By the grace of God, we had paid cash for our first home.

And we knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that God is good. We stepped out in faith and obedience at the beginning of our marriage to follow His leading to be counter-cultural and follow the Biblical principle of “owing no man anything” (see Romans 13:8). It has been far from easy and there have been many times when we’ve wanted to give up and give in. But as we’ve stayed faithful and obedient — even when the going got very tough — He has blessed that obedience and faithfulness far beyond our wildest imaginations.

Without God’s blessing and provision, we would never have been position to pay cash for a home. But He has seen fit to bless us with a spacious home that meets and exceeds all of our expectations. And it’s a testament to His goodness and graciousness to bless His children with good gifts. It is our heart’s desire that we be wise stewards of this home He has entrusted to us.

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House-Hunting: Could this be THE house?

by Crystal on July 01, 2010

Last week, I left you hanging after we’d been house-hunting for six months and were getting kind of tired of hearing the question “Have you found a house yet?” We were also becoming a little lax in our finances because we didn’t have a big goal to work for. So, we sat down and had a Money Meeting to make new financial goals for the following year.

One of the things we talked about seriously at that Money Meeting was “How long are we willing to wait to buy a house?” Meaning, is there some point in looking for a home when we’d feel like it was time to lower our standards and just go ahead and get the best house we could find in our price range at that time instead of waiting it out for something better?

Our reason for contemplating this was because we’d looked at two different houses that week which were both in our price range and in an area we liked. But both of the houses were far from ideal. There were so many issues with both of them that we didn’t like and they’d both need some pretty extensive work before we moved in. We wondered if this was going to be as good as it got. They were adequate and we could make them work, but we certainly didn’t like either of them.

Maybe we were being too particular? Maybe we just weren’t going to find what we were looking for in the price range we’d set? We really wanted to get a house we both loved, but were we being unrealistic? Perhaps we should just settle for something less-than-ideal, even if both of us really didn’t like it. After all, we’ve rented plenty of less-than-ideal places before and been perfectly content!

At the same time, we both didn’t want to fork over pretty much our entire savings account for something neither of us really liked. Something just didn’t seem right about that!

So we both agreed that we’d wait it out another six months and then re-evaluate how things were going. We also prayed together — for the umpteenth time! — that God would give us specific and clear wisdom and direction in this process.

Less than two days later, a house went on the market which met a lot of our criteria. It was in our price range and in an area we really liked, it had three bedrooms on the main floor and a master bathroom.

The bizarre thing was that there were no pictures posted online. We’d never looked at a house that hadn’t had pictures posted online, but for some reason this one caught our eye. And in a very uncharacteristic mode, we went and drove to the house to check it out. And as soon as we saw it, we both almost squealed: it was beautiful.

Surely there’d been some mistake. A house this beautiful couldn’t actually be in our price range.

So we figured there must be a reason there were no pictures online. It must have been gutted on the inside or something. But we still both just had to wonder if maybe this was THE house? However, we had no idea what the inside looked like nor did we have a clue whether the kitchen was anything decent so we tried our best not to get our hopes up until we’d actually seen it.

They weren’t allowing showings for a whole entire week because they were painting the inside. So what else was there to do but wait?

Never before in the house-hunting process had I felt like I was on pins-and-needles, but that whole week, I couldn’t seem to focus on anything else. I was terribly anxious to get to go inside the house, or see pictures or something. It was an excruciatingly long week.

Finally, the day arrived. I tried hard to prepare myself for the worst as I didn’t want to have my hopes dashed.

However, I could have hardly prepared myself for what the inside of the house looked like. In fact, I almost felt like crying: it was utterly gorgeous.

And then I walked into the kitchen. And I, who am usually terribly composed and rarely get dramatic about anything, had to suppress a squeal. The kitchen was amazing, just amazing.

The whole house was absolutely perfect. Everything we’d said were essentials, everything we’d hoped it might possibly have, all the little things that we’d always thought would really nice to have, but never expected we’d actually find in a house in our price range — this house had it all.

It felt like a dream and I was about ready to burst with excitement.

But of course, we had a few more hurdles to cross… so I tried my best to contain my excitement before it was really real.

To be continued next week… (I was hoping I could finish the story in one post, but alas, there’s too much to write!)

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House-Hunting: Patience Pays Off!

by Crystal on June 24, 2010

We purposefully waited to look at houses until we had saved 100% of our goal for our house-fund. Because we were committed to staying out of debt and paying cash for a house, we didn’t want to put ourselves in a situation where we looked at houses, fell in love with one and then were tempted to go borrow money in order to buy it (yes, we’re unabashedly weird like that!).

So we waited until we were completely ready and our house fund was fully-funded. And when we finally hit our goal at the beginning of the year, we’d been renting for seven years. Most people expected us to go right out and buy something almost immediately since we were finally ready to do so.

But we weren’t in any big rush. Sure, it would be nice to move to something a little better suited to our needs than our current rental, but we wanted to wait and find something we really liked and knew without a doubt was THE house for us.

We were initially thinking we’d find a house within a few months — if not sooner — but we quickly learned that when you’re paying 100% down on a house, you’re not in a big hurry to part with that money until you know you’ve found a house which you love.

So we waited, we prayed and we continued to look at houses.

After about five months of looking, I was getting a little tired of people asking “Have you found a house yet?” In fact, sometimes I felt like that mother who is pregnant and past her due date and people keep coming up and saying “When are you going to have that baby??”

I also was finding that we’d worked so hard for this big goal and now it felt like we were in a holding pattern. Going nowhere, getting no traction and without purpose. It wasn’t that we weren’t still saving money, it was just that we’d put a lot of our financial goals on hold until we found a house — since we wanted to have extra padding in our house budget to account for the additional expenses which might present themselves (necessary costs, moving expenses, work which would need to be done to the house, etc.)

When I talked to Jesse about this, we decided to sit down and map out a specific future game plan for our finances — even if we hadn’t found a house yet. We needed purpose and drive and goals. Without them, we were feeling a little aimless and slacking in sticking with the budget.

So we laid out specific dates for other financial goals and started working towards those. And almost immediately, the momentum was back and my frugal zeal returned!

And would you believe it? Within days of our “money meeting”, THE house went up for sale. And we signed a contract on it within 48 hours!

I guess you could say that we weren’t in a hurry until we found THE house — and then we certainly didn’t dawdle. How it all came to be is a bit of a wild story and still has us shaking our heads and pinching ourselves. But I’ll save all those details to share with you next week.

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House-Hunting: A Realtor is Priceless

by Crystal on June 18, 2010

In hunting for a house, we’ve found a realtor to be invaluable. Since we’ve never bought a house before, despite doing a lot of research, we feel like this has been a whole new world that we know nothing about.

How We Found a Good Realtor

1. We did initial research online and offline.

When we knew it was likely we were going to be looking for a house soon, we started investigating potential realtors in our area. We paid attention to which ones were successfully selling homes and which ones were selling homes in the areas and price ranges we were looking at. We also discussed specifics of what we were looking for in a realtor.

2. We asked friends and family for recommendations.

Once we’d done our initial research, we started asking for recommendations of good realtors from friends and family. We were looking for a competent realtor who had our best interests in mind — not someone who was related to someone we knew. (Unfortunately, you can often get burned if you choose Uncle Jim just because he’s your uncle instead of because he’s really competent and the best fit for you.)

3. We “interviewed” potential candidates.

After narrowing down the field to a few potential candidates for our realtor, we called and/or emailed them to ask them a few telling questions we’d prepared. How they responded, how professionally they responded and how quickly they responded helped us to make our final decision of which realtor to hire.

4. We prayed for wisdom.

Last but not least, we prayed for wisdom in making the decision. We believe wholeheartedly that God cares about all the details of our lives — from the big things to the little things. So we asked Him to give us wisdom and direction in this process.

It might seem like we went to a lot of trouble to choose a realtor, but our efforts paid off as our realtor has been absolutely wonderful. She’s honest, very hard-working and we have 100-percent confidence in her. She’s been an amazing asset to us as we’ve navigated these previously-uncharted waters — and we truly feel like we would be lost without her help!

Stay tuned over the next few weeks as I’ll be sharing more about our house-hunting and house-purchasing adventures. (And yes, if you’ve not caught onto my subtle hints over the last few weeks, we bought a house! More on that soon!)

Have you successfully hired a realtor before? If so, what advice would you give someone looking for a good realtor?

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House-Hunting: It’s Hard Work!

by Crystal on April 27, 2010

We spent years talking about owning a home and 21 months earnestly saving for one, but I guess I didn’t ever realize the work involved in actually buying a home. In fact, after the very first week of house-hunting, I asked my husband sarcastically, “Can you just find us a house and then surprise me?”

It’s not that I didn’t care, I was just beginning to realize the magnitude of time and effort house-hunting involves. My life is already quite full as it is, how was I supposed to carve out a number of extra hours each week for poring over online house listings and Google maps, driving around looking at homes, discussing the pros and cons of potential homes with my husband, scheduling viewings (and babysitters for those viewings!), and then actually going and walking through different homes?

It felt like I was practically taking on another full-time job!

(As a side note, I now have tremendous respect for those of you who are somehow managing to look for a new home and sell your current home at the same time — wow!)

We slowly have found our “groove” when it comes to house-hunting. And we’ve found that it’s helped tremendously for us to stop trying to look at every possibility out there and narrow down the search field. Here’s some criteria we’ve decided to use:

1) Location — We picked three locations we’re interested in. If a home is not in one of those three areas, we’re not even looking at it at this point.

2) Features — We picked three features which were most important to us: a good-sized kitchen, three bedrooms on one floor and a Master bathroom. When we look at a listing online, we first look to see if the home has these three things. If not, we don’t even bother looking further. (Our “most important features” might seem silly to some, but we’ve live in enough different rentals to know what works best for us!)

3) Pictures — A picture speaks a thousand words–especially when it comes to a potential home to buy. If the online pictures don’t “wow” us, we don’t pursue the house. I mean, if it looks ugly and ill-suited for our family online, I can’t imagine that it’s going to look ten times better in person.

If a house meets the above criteria and is in our price-range, than we’ll look at it. Otherwise, we pass it up. By following this method, we’re looking at fewer homes, for sure. But we’re saving a lot of time since we’re only looking at homes which are really good possibilities.

Just for fun: If you were to choose three non-negotiables you must have in a home you’d buy, what would they be? I’d love to hear!

Coming next time: A Good Realtor is Priceless

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Saving 100% Down for A Home: Part 4

by Crystal on April 27, 2010

A New Beginning

After three months of unemployment (which felt more like three years!), Jesse was offered a contract position at a large law firm in Kansas City. It was by no means an ideal job: the work was monotonous, the commute was long and there was no guarantee how long the position would last. But it was a job nonetheless, and we were very, very grateful and relieved.

As soon as his first paycheck came, we immediately began saving again — this time with the goal of having a six-month Emergency Fund in place. We were highly motivated after Jesse’s unexpected job loss to get this financial goal done as soon as we could!

Since we knew Jesse’s contract position was short-term (likely two years or less), we began praying about what God wanted us to do long-term. Both of us had been hoping since Jesse graduated from law school, that we could eventually move back to where we grew up and both of our families lived. It was hard to be a number of hours away — especially now that we had two young children.

The more we prayed about moving back, the more we felt that’s what we were supposed to do. How it would work out, we had no idea.

We continued scrimping and saving and working hard. By combining the extras we could squeeze out of Jesse’s budget and the increasing side income from MoneySavingMom.com, we were able to fully fund our Emergency Fund in March of 2008.

Reaching this financial goal in a fairly short amount of time gave us serious momentum, and after running a lot of numbers, we felt there was a good possibility we could actually save up enough to pay cash for a modest starter home in three to five years. We decided to go for it full-force!

Instead of focusing on this audacious goal though, we broke it down into baby-steps and set specific savings goals for each month. Jesse, being the numbers “nerd” he is, created a detailed spreadsheet outlining where we were and where we needed to go. We’d updated this spreadsheet every month and it was so encouraging to see our progress.

In the Summer of 2008, an attorney who owned his own law firm back in our hometown, offered Jesse the opportunity to office-share with him. Jesse had always wanted to start his own law firm, but we’d anticipated it would be a long time down the road, if ever.

Now that this door opened up though, we started seriously considering it, running numbers and praying about it. We knew Jesse’s contract job would likely be ending in the not-too-distant future and the more we prayed about it, opening our own law firm seemed like a very viable option for us.

We had enough in savings to live on for almost a year now, MoneySavingMom.com was bringing in a good income, and by office-sharing, Jesse could set up and run his law firm very inexpensively. Plus we were overjoyed at the thought of moving back home where most of our extended families and many lifelong friends lived.

At the same time though, it was a big jump. What if the law firm completely flopped? What if this turned out to be a big setback to us financially? What if we had to give up our big goal of paying cash for a house because we were just trying to put food on the table?

There were many, many unknowns, but we both felt a peace about moving forward. So we packed up our house (while I was in the middle of morning sickness with our third child. Morning sickness and moving seem to coincide frequently around here!), found a rental back home, moved back and Jesse opened his firm the beginning of October 2008.

We could have never guessed the miraculous surprise which would be right around the corner, allowing us to gain more financial traction in the next year than we could have ever imagined.

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Saving 100% Down for a Home: Part 3

by Crystal on February 25, 2010

A New Job in a New City

Jesse started his new job the beginning of 2007 with high hopes. 2006 had been a difficult year of finishing law school, preparing for the bar, taking the bar, waiting for the bar results, morning sickness and then spending a few months not knowing whether he was going to have a job at the beginning of the year or not.

We were very ready to get back into a “normal” routine after months of upheaval and uncertainty. And we were excited to start saving in earnest after years of depleting our savings.

But within the first month at his new job, Jesse realized this job was going to be a lot harder than he had anticipated. The learning curve was steep, the hours were long, the work was stressful and the office environment was tense.

It begin to wear on Jesse and within a few months, he was almost continually exhausted and stressed. More big projects arose and he had to put in longer hours. Jesse, the always easy-going, fun-loving guy, was so overloaded at work that he rarely smiled or enjoyed life anymore.

I knew it was becoming too much for him and I felt powerless to help him. I tried to make our home a welcoming haven for him, I tried to encourage him as best as I knew how, but the pressure he was dealing with at work was enormous.

He was working so many hours and was so focused on keeping up with his job that he wasn’t home much anymore. And when he was home, he wasn’t very “present.” It was a hard, hard time. He hated being “absent” from our family, but he also had to keep up with things at work lest his job be in jeopardy.

The stress trickled down to me and I began neglecting my own health. Soon I started experiencing issues in my pregnancy. I became very anemic and ended up in the hospital for five days when I was 34 weeks along. They were worried I was going to have to be induced early since my hemoglobin and platelet counts were so low. But God intervened and I was able to carry Kaitlynn to 38 weeks before being induced.

These health issues felt like the last thing Jesse needed to be dealing with. And I felt so bad that I was adding extra burdens to his already-overloaded plate. But God used it for good, because it was a wake-up call to both of us to realize something major needed to happen in Jesse’s job situation, or he needed to quit.

The thought of him quitting scared us though, as we desperately needed the insurance benefits from his job — especially now that I was having so many health issues. It was a vicious cycle and we felt trapped.

We prayed and talked about it a lot. More and more it felt like it was the right thing for Jesse to turn in his resignation. And yet at the same time, what about our financial goals and hopes and dreams? Wouldn’t it be completely shooting ourselves in the foot to voluntarily cut off most of our income?

And how would we survive if Jesse wasn’t able to get a new job right away? We had been working hard to try and save money, but after all the medical bills from my health problems, we only had enough in savings to live on for a few months. And my income from my online business was certainly not enough for us to survive on.

It seemed like it would be foolish to resign just because a job was too stressful, so we tried to come up with ways to restructure things in our home and lives to relieve as much stress as we could. We figured if we could just ride this out for a few more months, things would probably get a lot smoother.

But then very unexpectedly, Jesse was asked to resign. While this came as a complete shock to us because no one had any idea we were praying about him resigning, we took it as God’s clear direction for us. But we didn’t know what the next step might be, or how we were going to live if Jesse didn’t find a job very quickly.

So without much warning, we were left without our primary income source — in a new city with little support, few friends and even fewer business contacts.

At first, we were pretty confident finding a new job wouldn’t be too hard. After all, we were in a big city and Jesse had his law license. How hard could it really be to find something which would pay the bills?

Well, apparently it was a whole lot harder than we’d initially envisioned. The days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months.

We applied for just about every job under the sun. We prayed harder than we’d ever prayed before. We contacted anyone and everyone who might have a possible job lead. We followed up with every application and did our best to leave no stone unturned.

And yet, no one was even calling to offer Jesse an interview, let alone a job.

I wish I could say that I kept a cheerful attitude through all of this. On the contrary, I woke up every morning with a sick feeling in my stomach wondering how much longer things would go on like this. And I’m very ashamed to admit it, but I often found myself angry at my husband.

I felt alone, scared and stressed, and I took out my frustrations on my husband — which was the last thing he needed at one of the lowest points in his life. Our marriage started feeling the toll, and during those months of unemployment, there were times when it was only hanging on by a thread.

[Just a short side note: A few months after all of this took place, God really convicted me of how wrong my attitudes were during this whole experience and I went and humbly asked for my husband's forgiveness -- which he graciously gave to me, even though I didn't deserve it. I'm thrilled to report that our marriage is much stronger today as a result of all of these trials and I believe beyond any shadow of a doubt that I am married to the most wonderful man in the whole wide world! He has stuck by me through thick and thin and loved me no matter what. I'm so blessed to be Jesse's wife!]

Gratefully, we didn’t have any debt and we were still living on a strict budget, so the job loss didn’t plunge us into complete financial ruin. I can’t even fathom what it would have been like had we piled up a bunch of debt in law school or followed the advice offered by many following law school: to go buy a house and live extravagantly now that my husband was officially a lawyer.

While our marriage was in bad shape, we did make one good decision — to be as creative and resourceful as we could in order to avoid dipping into our Emergency Fund unless we absolutely had to.

At this point, I had an online bookstore and a small personal blog which I’d slowly been growing. I had recently written a course on Supermarket Savings and we decided to experiment and run a big blow-out sale. We set up an affiliate program for the sale and notified as many of our online friends and companies about the sale.

By God’s grace, the three-day sale on our ebook package earned enough money for us to live on for a few months. We could hardly believe it! That was a huge bright spot in the midst of tremendous discouragement.

We started to really think outside the box when it came to our income: Jesse took on some contract jobs, we got a newspaper route and I continued to bring in some supplementary income through the online bookstore.

It was also during this time that the idea for MoneySavingMom.com was born. There weren’t any blogs listing weekly deal match-ups for drug stores at that point and many people who had purchased my Supermarket Savings ecourse were writing and asking for more help and counsel.

I’d learned a lot about blogging and monetizing a blog over the past few years and I figured starting a frugal, money-saving blog might be a great opportunity to test some of those ideas out. Jesse was excited about the idea, so we brain-stormed a name and set up the site.

At that point, I was hoping the site would provide a place for me to practically help people learn to live on less by sharing things which had allowed our family to stay out of debt and live on a beans-and-rice budget. Little could we have dreamed that MoneySavingMom.com would someday soon be earning a full-time income and help us be able to save and pay cash for a home!

Unbeknownst to us, while it seemed like we were getting nowhere in the job search, God was doing some pretty amazing things behind-the-scenes to lay things out for our lives to be turned upside-down — in a very wonderful way!

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Our Journey Towards Saving 100% Down For Our First Home: Part 1

by crystal on December 31, 2009

Yes, we paid cash for our home, but we don’t think most people should follow in our exact footsteps. While we hope to encourage and inspire you through our story to think outside the box and set big goals, we want you to adopt goals which are right for your own family — even if they are much different from our family’s. Every family is in a different situation with different needs, different circumstances and different longterm goals.

We think being debt-free and owning a home outright can be a wonderful thing, but there are many ways to get there and it’s going to look different for everyone. We chose to do something pretty counter-cultural and save up and pay cash upfront, but this was because we were in a unique position to do what we did. And it started way back when we were young…

A Wise Financial Upbringing

My grandpa had raised my dad that the only debt which he should ever have would be a mortgage on his house. My dad took this to heart and when I was very young, my parents, who had never had consumer debt, began working towards paying off their mortgage early. After they paid off their mortgage, they began saving to build a house debt-free.

When I was 10 years old, they sold our current paid-for residence and our family moved to a rundown trailer (which didn’t have heat, air conditioning or a stove!) while they built a house debt-free using the money from the sale of our paid-for house and the money they had saved. My dad was the general contractor and did a lot of the manual labor in order to save money. I recall going with my parents to store after store while they negotiated prices on everything from the trusses to the light fixtures to the toilets.

Within seven months, our home was finished enough for us to move out of the dilapidated trailer. And they had paid for everything in cash! Observing their commitment to live a debt-free life and the sacrifices and creativity they employed in order to accomplish it had a profound impact upon me.

When my husband was 11, his mom died after a long struggle with cancer. After her death, Jesse received a small sum of money and his dad wisely invested most of this money for him to use for college — which we are so grateful for! His foresight to do this is one of the main reasons our family is in the financial position we are today as that money, combined with what Jesse was able to save while working part-time through high school and college, added up to almost the exact amount needed to pay cash for law school ($35,000).

Jesse’s dad and stepmom also modeled careful financial stewardship: they always lived within their means, didn’t buy things they couldn’t afford and worked hard to pay off their house early. Jesse was inspired by this from an early age and started to hope he could follow in their footsteps when it came to finances.

Paying Cash for College

In his last year of high school, Jesse started applying for scholarships in earnest and he was able to get a full ride for the first two years of his undergrad. He also lived at home and worked part-time, so his expenses were very low and he was able to continue to save money.

He transferred to a private Christian college in Virginia in his third year. While he learned a lot from his year there, it cost an arm and a leg and he also wasn’t able to work much while going there. When he ran the numbers, he realized that if he were going to stay at the private college for his last year of undergrad, it would significantly cut into his law school savings. So he decided to move back home and finish out his final year at the state university he’d started at.

There was also another strong reason he chose to move back home: he was anxious to marry me!

Getting On the Same Page About Finances

When Jesse finalized his plans to move back home and finish his final year of undergrad at the state university, he started applying for scholarships there. We were thrilled when he was able to get an almost full scholarship again for his last year. He once again lived at home and worked part-time, enabling him to keep his expenses very low and allowing him to save money.

Soon after he moved back, we got engaged and started planning for our future. One of the things we spent a lot of time discussing and praying about was finances.

Since we had both had such an excellent financial upbringing and wise examples in our parents, neither of us had any debt, and we were very committed to living beneath our means. However, in crunching the numbers, we knew it was going to take some extreme creativity and frugality if we were going stay out of debt through law school.

Jesse had researched the costs of law school and determined it would likely be a little over $10,000 per year if he were to go to an in-state school and get a scholarship. He also had to add on the cost of books, which would be somewhere in the vicinity of $4,000 total.

All told we were looking at it costing right around $35,000 for three years of law school — which was almost the exact amount he had in savings thanks to the money his father invested for him plus the money the money he saved while working.

So we could pay cash for law school, but we also had to find a way to survive and pay our bills during those three years. We figured that we could live on right around $1,000 per month if we basically only spent money on the bare necessities. I had saved up $5,000 from working some part-time jobs before marriage, but we were hoping to keep that set aside as an Emergency Fund to use in case we had some crisis (and we did indeed end up using it a few months into law school when Jesse totaled his car!).

We were looking at having to find a way to come up with at least $36,000 extra in cash to pay for our basic living expenses for the next three years. That probably doesn’t seem like much to some of you, except we were hoping to start a family soon after we were married and we were committed to me being a stay-at-home mom once children came along. In addition, Jesse was limited to working only 20 hours per week per the law school rules (they limit students to only working part-time since the class load is so heavy in law school. And, in retrospect, I think anyone would be pretty out of their mind to try and work much more than that!)

We made a very barebones budget and we talked about every way possible we could come up with to cut expenses and bring in extra income. In addition, we discussed what sacrifices we’d be willing to make if it came down to it.

After much prayer, we knew this was the path God was calling us to; but it didn’t mean we weren’t scared or stressed sometimes, wondering how it was all going to work out. At the same time, though, we were excited to make a leap of faith and see God do miracles on our behalf.

Practicing Frugality From the Get-Go

We got married right before Jesse’s last semester of undergrad and we started practicing frugality from the get-go: we honeymooned in an old and inexpensive hotel in a small town in a neighboring state and splurged once to go out to eat at Subway. The rest of our honeymoon we ate food we’d brought from home or which we picked up at Dollar General while we were there!

Back from our honeymoon, we rented the cheapest apartment we could find and we outfitted it with furniture hand-me-downs we got from friends and family, plus a used couch we bought for $100. We both worked as many hours we could at our part-time jobs, we saved everything we possibly could and we learned that a strong marriage is not dependent upon how much money you spend, but on the depth of your love and commitment to one another.

Jesse graduated from the state university in May and we started making plans for our move to Topeka, Kansas, for him to go to law school. The real test of our faith and frugality was about to begin.

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