Hi Mama,

What would you do if you were married, recently graduated and living 400 miles away from family with only $100 in the bank to support two people? In September 2014, that was my life. And how my life has changed. I went from crying because I didn’t know how we would afford the groceries this week to buying our beautiful 4 bedroom home at age 27, just 5 years later. This is our personal finance journey.

 

>>OUR PERSONAL FINANCE JOURNEY<<

>>Rough Beginnings

My husband (Huy) and I got married when we were still in undergrad; I was 20 and he was 21. We met in 2010 and fell head over heels in love pretty much instantly. After our wedding, we finished our senior year of undergrad at the University of Maine at Farmington. Then, in July 2014, relocated to New Jersey. Huy decided to pursue a master’s degree in Finance at Rutgers Business School in Newark. I had no interest of going to grad school, but also didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. While Huy started his graduate program full-time, I was searching for jobs.

Since we were so far away from home (Maine) it was really hard for me to find employment. I didn’t have any connections, was unfamiliar with the city/state, and didn’t have much work experience on my resume outside from waitressing and my campus jobs. I applied for nearly 80 jobs and was not getting any calls. And as the weeks and months passed, the bank account dwindled. Our $5,000 that we had when we moved to New Jersey had reached an all-time low of only $100.

Lucky for me, I finally I found a job as an immigration paralegal. Soon after I got my job, I needed to go to my annual OB/GYN appointment in order to get my birth control prescription refilled. I took the bus 30 minutes to Planned Parenthood. I didn’t have insurance since I was a contract employee, and was making $15/hr. Because of this, my appointment ended up costing me $70 for the visit plus 1 month of birth control. I remember I started crying when I handed my debit card over for payment because we only had $100 left in the bank. I’ll never forget the ride home on the bus, wondering how we were going to make it.

In order to save money during this hard time, I bought my work clothes Goodwill and we budgeted $50 for groceries for two people for the week. I ate a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch everyday and Huy was able to make 1 chicken breast last the whole week for his lunch; he would stir fry it with veggies and eat with rice. One container of cream cheese would last a whole month, you pretty much couldn’t taste it, and could barely see it on the bagel. We didn’t go anywhere. We didn’t have cable. We didn’t have a car.

I worked hard because I knew there was a chance to be hired by the law firm full-time which would mean benefits, sick days and higher pay. By November, I was offered the full-time position. After the new year, I started making $21/hr which felt like a ton of money back then. Then in February 2015, Huy got a job as a part-time intern which paid him a whopping $27/hr! We were finally making it out of the dark days, paying off my student loans in the process.

By October 2015, Huy was offered a full-time position at his company. He worked during the day and went to school at night. I continued in my job as a paralegal but I wasn’t happy. During the busy seasons I would work from 8am-10pm and sometimes work the weekends as well. Not only that, but my commute was 1 hour and 10 minutes one way via walking, train and shuttle bus (if there were no delays, which if you know NJ Transit then you know there are MANY delays). I wanted to get back into higher education but the positions I wanted required master degrees. I would have to go back to school in order to get out of my job where I was unappreciated and overworked. In August 2016, I finally quit my job and started my Masters in Global Affairs at Rutgers–Newark.

>>A Few Money Mistakes

Since Huy was working full-time and getting paid well, we were able to pay off my student loans (he didn’t have any) before I started graduate school. For my first year of graduate school, we paid my tuition out of pocket and we continued to live on campus in family housing. I wanted to continue to contribute to the finances while I was in school so I found a part-time job working as an office assistant for the international student services office. This was the field I wanted to go in so I was really happy to get some experience there. I also did an internship for a non-profit in the international education sector in NYC.

My second year of graduate school I took on a graduate assistantship with the office of housing and residence life. This position paid for my tuition, rent and gave me a small stipend. This is also where money mistake #1 happened: we didn’t take advantage of the savings. Instead, we pissed our money away by eating out, frequently traveling to NYC, and just not paying attention to what we were spending on. We started shopping at Whole Foods since it was the closest grocery store to our apartment.

But the biggest problem is that we didn’t even see the mistake we were making while it was happening. We still had “plenty of money” and therefore didn’t find any reason to budget. How wrong we were. If we had kept our budget throughout this year we could have easily saved an additional $20k. Like they say, hindsight is 20/20.

Unfortunately we continued down the road of money mistakes in our personal finance journey. Once I graduated from grad school we were finally going to live in an apartment off campus for the first time in our lives. We had been together for over 7 years and had lived in university housing the entire time. The idea of having a cute apartment that was finally a place of our own was so exciting. We went apartment hunting with a budget in mind: max of $1,700/month. We saw some apartments in our budget and looked at a few above our budget. What. A. Mistake. That was mistake #2 in our personal finance journey.(Watch Us Make Mistake #2 Here!)

In June we moved into our fancy “luxury” apartment. (Watch The Apartment Tour!) It was $2,100/month and was about 700 square feet. But we were in awe. It was modern, brand new, and was located on the direct train line into NYC. I was looking for jobs (again) and this time was much more successful. I started my full-time job in August 2018. But with this job came the necessity to have a car to commute to work and back (though I probably could have made the train work, but this chapter of our life is titled “money mistakes” so of course I didn’t do that).

Since we knew nothing about cars, we decided it was best to buy a new car rather than to buy a used car that might have issues. We bought a brand new Honda Civic (with financing) and I started my job. After all, a car payment is only $370/month, no problem! After a month of driving to work though, I found that the expenses of the car added up quickly ($120 for gas + $210 for tolls + $110 insurance + $100 parking at home + $30 parking at work + $370 car payment = $830). EIGHT HUNDRED AND THIRTY DOLLARS A MONTH TO DRIVE A CAR. WITHOUT MAINTENANCE.

Also, did I mention, we got a dog? Yup, dogs add up too! By the time the new year rolled around, our parking fee increased to $185. The monthly cost of living in our apartment was now up to $2,300+, a whopping $600 above our original budget. We knew we had to do something to get out of this expensive mess. After-all, we were trying to save up to buy a house, which is extremely expensive in New Jersey. The goal was to buy one by 2020, and at this rate, it wasn’t going to happen. So we broke the lease.

>>Reaching the Ultimate Dream

We ended up moving closer to my job in February 2019. The total monthly savings that came with the move was $1,000 since our rent was in our budget, I no longer had to pay tolls to get to work and parking at our new apartment complex was FREE. We finally stopped making money mistakes and started moving in the right direction. (Check Out The New Apartment!)

At the same time, Huy was learning a lot more about personal finances. (Check out this podcast we both love that has taught us a lot!) Since he is a finance major, we luckily had been investing money in our retirement and health savings accounts already so the mistakes we made were in relation to the remaining money we had available to us. We started acting smarter and putting our money into CDs to mature rather than letting it sit in a savings account with little to no interest.

In June 2019, we found out we were expecting baby Fawny. We decided that since there was a baby on the way, we should consider moving into a house since our apartment was noisy. We checked over our finances and started the house hunting process. Luckily despite all of our silly mistakes over the past few years, we were able to have enough money for a down payment on a house that is perfect for our family and in a good neighborhood.

On September 5th we got the deed to our new house, just 2 weeks before my 27th birthday. After we moved in, we spent a lot of time looking back at how far we had come. Now we can laugh about the bagels with the smallest smear of cream cheese as we enjoy an extra cream-cheesy bagel. And even though we made so many money mistakes, we are learning from them. We plan to teach our kids important financial lessons from an early age so that their personal finance journey isn’t riddled with mistakes like ours was!

I must also say that we are very lucky to be where we are today. Granted we are here today because of the hard work and dedication we put in over the years, and yes, we could be even further along if we had been smarter, but to be 27 and enjoying our home is something to be proud of. So what started as a scary journey in Newark, New Jersey with $100 to our names has ended in the best possible way: financial stability and a warm and welcoming home for our baby girl to come home to this February.

 

I hope this story is inspiring to you. The main take-away is that it doesn’t matter where you start, the only thing that matters is the decisions you make after starting. Each choice you make can have a huge impact down the road, even if it seems so small now. I have learned a lot about personal finance over this journey into adulthood and hope to share more insights with you in the future. Maybe I’ll even have Huy do a guest post to give his own insights since he’s really the mastermind behind our financial success story.

 

Let me know in the comments what your biggest financial mistake was or tell me about your personal finance journey. I want us all to learn from each other and grow.

xo

Mother of Fawn