Our Financial Story Part 1

Our Financial Story starts right at this picture. This was taken in the spring of 2008 in a house we rented in Hanford, California. I was a full time college student and Martha was working nights at the hospital as an RN. A year later at the same time in 2009, Martha was still working at the hospital, I was trying to launch a green business, and we had a new house, and two vehicle payments. A year after that, in 2010, we would add $37,000 of student loan debt and a couple credit cards. We were normal; and it sucked.

The summer of 2010 is when we started looking at our finances and admitting that what we were doing was not working. I began to read more, and listen to radio shows on money. I came across the Dave Ramsey show on the local radio station out of Fresno and began to listen closely. What he said made sense to me and so I began talking to Martha about it. We really had nothing to lose.

We implemented the Baby Steps and began eliminating debt. In the fall of 2011, I finished my Bachelors Degree in Business Administration and Management and promptly got a job roughnecking on a drilling rig in Northern Alberta Canada. To this day, I keep a small sample of oil sands in a decorative jar next to my degree as a reminder of what $37,000 buys you; a job as a roughneck taking orders from guys with not even a high school diploma who were also 7 years younger than myself. It was a well deserved and humbling experience for me.

I continued working in the oilfield. I went from roughneck to instrumentation hand with an international oilfield services company. In 2013, I managed to get a job as a Drilling Fluids Engineer with a different oilfield services company. All the while, we kept working our debt snowball. Three years into this thing and we were still working on killing off student loans and saving for infertility treatments to have a baby. It wasn't until 2015, approximately 5 years after starting our journey to being debt free, that we achieved that goal. We had paid off all the vehicles, the student loans, got rid of the credit cards, and financed two rounds of infertility treatments to the tune of about $50,000. All said and done, by the time we left California in the fall of 2015 for North Dakota, we had paid off and deferred a grand total of around $250,000. This amazing accomplishment would become even more important than I could have ever imagined from 2016 forward which I will tell the rest of the story in another post.

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