When the hard choice is the better choice.

When we got married, Cody bashfully informed me of his outstanding credit card debt that he wasn’t interested in sharing before we said, “I do!”

He then proceeded to let me know that we had six months of “grace” and we would be paying back his student loan debt… a whopping $72,000 at 11% interest rate. Yep, thats $954.58 a month— MINIMUM.

I was unemployed and hunting for work, he was employed making roughly 26k BEFORE taxes and insurance.

We spent the first year of our marriage in financial hell and couldn’t get ourselves in healthy conversations about it. Cody, filled with shame and embarrassment that he brought it to the marriage. Me, full of frustration and hurt that this was kept from me and that we weren’t communicating about it.

For perspective, I ended up getting three jobs, and still ends just weren’t met. We spent money and didn’t discuss it. We got more credit cards and racked up more debt. Months where our cell phones “stopped working” but really we were so behind on payments that they just cut us off. We lived in a little apartment with broken EVERYTHING because we didn’t have money to fix it. There were weeks where I walked to my job because we needed gas to get other places and my job was only a mile. We lived on beans, sweet potatoes and peanut butter and jelly and family dinners where other people fed us.

Needless to say, that was the skinniest I have ever been!

Heres the thing: We were probably the most supported “poor people” around town. Surrounded by family that would give us the shirts off their backs. And in some circumstances they did. But we, we were too stubborn to “beg” for any type of help.

After roughly a year of this type of chaotic living we spent a weekend in Nashville with some friends. One of those sweet friends worked for Dave Ramsey. He somehow was able to get Cody to share more with him about our financial hell in 30 minutes of conversation than I had in our entire relationship.

And Within 48 hours of leaving Nashville and heading back to Montgomery, Cody had read The Total Money Makeover . Yes, an entire book about financial wisdom in less than 2 days.

The morning Cody finished the book, I walked into our living room that was decked out in old, hand me down, used and non matching furniture, grabbed my cup of coffee and had just taken a seat on our old paid couch.

Cody kneeled down in front of me and grabbed my hands.

I seriously thought someone had died.

He carried a look that held weight I’d never seen in him before. He looked down, then met my eyes, tearing up as he spoke:

“I need you to forgive me for where I’ve put us. And today, I need you to trust me as I take us on a journey to get out of the hole I put us in.”

Did my husband just admit financial problems OUT LOUD? Is this real?

In this moment, I had a few options.

I had the option to spit in his face, yell out an “I TOLD YOU SO!”, rub in the emotions I carried for a year.

But in that moment all I could feel was complete trust. Trust and knowledge that this was a pivotal moment. This was a monumental and could actually change the trajectory of our future if I just said “Yes!” to the hard thing.

Saying yes to trusting my spouse looked like facing conversations where we really ACTUALLY looked at our financial hell.

Saying yes meant working my tail off to pay debt that I didn’t put us in.

Saying yes meant I would be sacrificing fun events, evenings out with friends, traveling, and nice new things to pay down this debt.

And when we looked at it, we knew that this was not “just for one year.”

We knew this could take us a decade. If our financial situation never changed, this was going to take us until we were 33 years old to pay off.

And we both said “YES!”

We said “yes” to the hard thing.

Because in those days, the hard thing was better than the poor thing. Because we had done the poor thing and the poor thing was definitely much harder.

Were we still poor? YES. very much so.

But were we telling our money what to do instead of it drowning us? YES. very much so.

That moment in our living room of un-matching everything, really did change the trajectory of our lives.

We have been doing the harder thing since that day in 2015. Years of “living like no one else, so we could one day live like no one else.”

We renovated houses (ourselves) and lived in the chaos.

We started businesses and worked insane hours of the night.

We moved cities and changed jobs and locations and took on the extra shifts.

And miracle after miracle after miracle kept rolling through.

And if we know one thing for certain: Miracles aren’t running out anytime soon.

That debt didn’t take 10 years. It took 2.

We don’t take that for granted either. We take it seriously. We take seriously the mountains that moved on our behalf and the favor God blessed us with, all from sacrificing our comfort for the sake of the harder choice.

Fast forward 6 years.

No debt, a real estate investment business we built ourselves, living in a new city with all new everything, a two year old, and a baby on the way.

We will be moving a new house soon. One we desperately want to fix up into a “dream” home. We could afford a small loan to get the immediate fix we want to this house.

We even planned all we would do in a short period of time.

That’s when we stopped.

We looked at what we want the next 6 years to look like. And doing the “easy thing” would leave us bound to a home instead of free to experiences.

A choice we made a long time ago to give focus to in our lives.

That’s when I looked at Cody and said, “I would rather do the hard thing than the poor thing.”

With Jesus, the hard choice is still hard.

But it’s always better.