Dear David,
Thank you so much for writing “Start Late…”. My husband and I are in mid 30s and had no saving or positive checking account for decade. I bought your book for my husband on last Valentine’s day and we both learned so much. Quick and simple steps brought us to a higher place and it CAN be done!
Ever since my husband and I were college kids, we had had very hard time keeping up with finance. We hardly had financial support from our parents in college days and often couldn’t pay rent, gas, telephone and electric bills that by the time we got married, we were broker than broke. After we got married, I became pregnant and for 8 years, I stayed home for our little children even though my husband was making barely enough. But we didn’t want someone else to raise our children and wanted to build a solid foundation for them at the beginning of their lives. Financial difficulty came second on our list. But it was so hard we had countless sleepless nights and weeks worrying about where the money would come for the next bills.
Now, both of our children are full time in school so that I viciously started to look for jobs. Sadly, my town has very minimal jobs available that I received many declined calls for jobs. My husband and I finally swallowed our pride and went to welfare for finance support. It was gut wrenching to use food stamp card at the store. But it was also a blessing. My husband and I realized that if we can swallow our pride for this humiliation, we can certainly keep tight budget and make payment plan with utility companies so that we can catch up with all our late bills. It has been over a year since we started our “reality budget”. Today, we not only have extra money in our account AFTER paying bills, but also we are proudly off from the welfare program! I also started to work full time, by blessing. I work during the day and my husband work at night so that one parent can be reached in case of emergency for our children. It is hard to spend any quality time with my husband lately but we are eager to build solid financial status for our children today. We certainly don’t want to go back to the “worrying nights”.
We recently bought a brand new minivan! For 14 years we are together, we never had a brand new car!! It was always 5-10 years old cars that brought more bills to keep fixing them. Our latest car had no heat and an old starter that didn’t always work. Now, our children are very proud of our new minivan! They went through so much also..
It is very simple but also very important to keep up with the budget and cut meaningless spending, writing down every transaction we made with checks, debit and Visa so that we know exactly where we stand. It has been a very very long road to reach stable financial status but now we are HERE!
I want to share our story with those who are going through rough times like we had. I want them to know that light is there. If we can make it, so can they. It might seem very dark to even think starting new lifestyle but day by day, you would see the diffence you would make and by a year, you would be dancing. Don’t give up hope and dreams. We reached it after 14 years! I wish you all the support and good health. Thank you.
