A Journey Through Unemployment, part 2

Last week I shared that in May 2010, my husband lost his job.  I wanted to continue that post and tell you how God prepared us for the 10 and a half months that were to follow.

Most people always want to know how in the world we made it so long without losing our house, our marriage or our sanity!  The most honest answer I can give is because we had faith in GOD!  Whether you want to believe that or not, it was him.  Without God's grace in our lives, his guidance and overflowing blessings, we may have lost all three things mentioned above.  In all seriousness, we survived because we planned financially for a lay off.

I will first say that we are die hard Dave Ramsey Followers.  It totally sounds like a cult, but I swear the man has it going on!  Two years prior to the dreaded phone call (i.e. honey I lost my job), a dear friends of ours invited us to attend Financial Peace University (FPU) at church.  That's where in 3 short months I struggled through my love-hate relationship with Dave Ramsey.

My husband became infatuated with the man and his principles and I had to institute the "no Dave in bed" rule.  Ok, let me explain that one.  We would lie in bed and he would say, "ya know what Dave said today?"  And after a few months, I had enough of Dave.  So, that's where the rule came in.

Back to FPU....we learned amazing money principles in that class.  We learned how to work off of a cash budget, save for annual expenses and wisely plan for retirement.  Sounds basic, but it's not.  At least not to us.  We didn't have any debt (other than the house since we had previously paid off some credit card debt and student loans), but we weren't saving anything besides what Uncle Sam gave us back at the end of the year. We wanted to make the best decisions we could with the income God had given us.

In short, in about a year and a half we were able to fully tithe to our church, save up 6 months of living expenses in an emergency fund, save half the amount budgeted towards our new car fund, and stick to a cash budget (well, mostly).  We tried to live modestly and make wise financial decisions.

By learning to stick to a cash budget, keeping our Dave cars (a.k.a. very old vehicles that were paid for) and having zero debt we knew we could survive IF, and I say IF, my husband lost his job.  We weren't perfect by any means and we still purchased things we didn't need, however, we felt we had truly grown in the are of learning to handle our finances.

Since we had learned those things, we had a savings from which we could draw from monthly for expenses.  We also had practice in suppressing our wants and focusing on needs.  It wasn't easy and we caved on some things, BUT we had a foundation.  We were so thankful that God had given us wise friends that led us to learning how to handle our finances.  We were thankful that even though we were given zero severance we had some money to live on for however long it took to find employment.

So....if you don't know anything about Dave Ramsey, go to his website right now.....daveramsey.com!

In my next post I will share some additional ways in which God provided financially....