I won’t even pretend to remember what the exact time or day was. If you ask my wife she’d probably be able to tell you down to the nano-second. She’d probably even be able to tell you exactly what I was wearing on this day. For what I want to convey here, let me stick with what I know. The one thing that I can tell you is things were not all peaches and cream in the my household. Toward the end of 2005, we lived a life that was in total disarray. We’d just purchased our home, and were on our way to building the life we thought we wanted. But, SURPRISE!!! As Dave Ramsey, constantly says, Life happened. Life has a way of inviting you to every party it throws, no matter if you want to be there or not. And usually there is a huge bus headed straight for you full speed ahead when you get there. After the purchase of our house I began to track our family’s finances. You know, the normal, “where every dime was going”. To my dismay, at the end of the month I found it was only by the grace of God that were were making it. Our output way surpassed our income; we had no savings, I was 28 years old and I saw no light at the end of the tunnel.
A series of events and poor judgments led to an even more dismal mind-set over the next month or so. My wife and I had many of adult “DISCUSSIONS” about things in our household. Finances, as you would guess, were among the most common topic. The “DISCUSSION” however, was not us trying to better our financial state. For the most part each DISCUSSION was about our shared financial responsibility that was in fact non-existent. During one of these many discussions, I brought up my need to always have some cash in my pocket. You see, my office is always going out for lunch together and I was always more worried about what check is going to bounce because Captain Whoever wanted to go out to eat again. So what did I do? I applied for a credit card specifically to supplement my offices eating habits. Several more life events transpired, and I thought to myself; “I need some extra money to fall back on… You know, just in case of an emergency.” I got the second credit card in the mail about 2 weeks later. Needless to say, that these two items caused more trouble than they were worth. In a short period of time I managed to single-handedly make 2 poor decisions that completely put more on me than i could bare. Can you see the walls are closing in on me!
Over the next few months many things had happened, some of which I will not get into. The most important thing that happened was I was fed up! During one of our adult “DISCUSSIONS” my wife informed me of a book she wanted US to read together. It was a way for us to get our finances in order. During this particular discussion she was not fully aware of the hole I had dug for us. All she knew was that I was struggling and having a hard time. So she continued to tell me about this book one of her friends, told her about. She also told me that her friend had promised to lend her his DVDs of something call Financial Peace. I agreed to go through the training with her however, my mind was not fully focused on the words she was saying, all I heard during the conversation was “I was talking to ANOTHER GUY about how YOU CAN’T handle OUR MONEY”! Immediately I knew my marriage was in trouble. So my agreement was not an agreement to fix my mistakes it was an agreement to save my marriage. And this was the beginning, the moment I got fed up!
Corey Stokes 