How Jackie Paid Off Nearly $100,000 Of Debt To Become Debt Free

Hey Jackie, welcome to the His and Her Money Show. Hi Jackie, hi guys. We are so excited to have you here with us because you have a great story of debt freedom that we know our audience can't wait to hear more about as they are on their journeys to debt freedom. We just love to bring stories like yours so that people can become motivated and know that this is a reality. But before we get into your story, can you just take a moment and introduce yourself to everybody and let them know what you're all about?

Sure, I'm Jackie Freeman. I live in northeast Nebraska with my husband of 13 years and we have two kiddos, they are seven and nine. I work part-time as a school nurse and then my husband and I own a fuel delivery business here in our small community.

So let's talk about the debt that you had. Tell our audience about your debt or your past debt, how much debt it was in total, and what did the debt consist of?

We had nearly $100,000 worth of debt, and that included our home, several vehicles, my college loans, my husband's college loans, several credit cards, and a home improvement loan.

Wow. So for you guys, talk to us about what was the eye-opening moment or moments that kind of changed the way you guys went about your business when it came to your personal finance. Because you took out these loans for various reasons, you had certain goals in mind, and then all of a sudden you came to the realization that you need to do something about this debt, you need to eliminate this debt. How did your mindset shift or what caused this to happen?

For us, it was a mindset shift and it was a culture shock really. Our pastor at our church had been talking about Financial Peace University and how he wanted to bring that to our congregation. I was intrigued by this because I had some friends that had done the class and really wanted to do it, but my husband was hesitant. I talked to one of my best friends and her husband was also hesitant to take the course. Well, our husbands happened to have grown up together, and we knew that if we could kind of play on that a little bit, maybe we could get them convinced. So I prayed hard and prayed a lot, and she worked on her husband, I worked on mine. So we ended up taking the class, we all signed up together. At that time it was 13 weeks, and there were quite a few members of our community that had gone through it together, so it was nice to have that support team, people to bounce ideas off of, and then that weekly class so that we had that culture with other people to all be working on the same thing.

Talk about the mindset that you guys had to put yourself in once you finally said okay, let's take this class and now we're going to attack this debt. Talk about the mental preparation that you guys had to go through in order to be successful.

We've never done a budget before, so this caused a lot of arguments. I remember sitting down before we had started the class and telling my husband, 'This is how much money we've made, I don't know where it went. We should have been able to not put more on the credit card, we should have been able to have paid this off, but it's not there.' So putting everything down on paper, that was huge. We both had different ideas of where we wanted to go with this though and how we were going to accomplish it. We had three vehicles and we had a motorcycle, and I thought we could sell some things, we could get some vehicles that didn't cost as much. He didn't want to get rid of anything, so that caused us to have to make a compromise there. So we agreed that if we could make the budget work and we could continue making those payments, that we would keep each of those things. And so that's what we did. When we called Dave when we paid off everything except for the house, we did our debt-free call on air, and the thing that he said was, 'Oh, so you didn't get rid of any of the toys, you decided to keep them.' Yep, and that made us work a little bit harder, but that also made my husband happy because he got to keep his stuff.

So how long did it take you guys to pay off all they did?

It took us 27 months to pay off just over $50,000. So we were gazelle intense. One of the things that I realized right off the bat was that the place that we spent the most money that really varied from month to month was our grocery budget. So I had started working part-time probably six months before we had taken the class, so we were still working with less income than what we had been accustomed to. I was working part-time at a local nursing home, so I took some more hours there, and my husband ended up taking some extra jobs working for farmers during harvesting and planting and driving truck for them. So those things helped, but then I also kind of took it upon myself to make a second job out of couponing. So I tracked my coupon use, and I was an extreme couponer, I would say I was more of a practical couponer buying the things that our family needed. In one year I had saved over $2,000 on coupons, so that was one thing that helped us too.

Now you said when you guys first sat down, this budgeting thing was brand new, had never done it before, and it caused a lot of fights. Talk us through how you went from that starting place to being on the same page. How did you guys get through those bumps and bruises early on and kind of find some middle ground there?

In Dave's class, he talks about how one is the nerd and one is the free spirit, and I can't really say that those roles are clearly defined in our relationship. I'm more of a number freak, and so I will plug those numbers in and then just being able to look at that and say, 'Okay, this is what our goal is and this is the date that we want to have this paid off and these are the things that we want to do,' and then making that plan of how we're going to get there, I think that helped. And then me realizing that I can't have it the way that I want to have it, and my husband realizing he can't have it the way that he wants to have it, so meeting in the middle. And then that communication for the budget each month, it's not just a budget that I write out with the numbers on paper and then expect him to follow it. It's both of us having that communication, like 'This has come up and this is something that I feel that I need, so how can we make this work?'

So on top of doing a budget, what were some other things that you guys did in order to knock out this debt, especially that $50-something thousand in 27 months? That's amazing. What were you guys doing to make that gazelle intensity so intense?

Another thing, you know God was really, really gracious during this time. One of the things that we started right away was Dave talks about putting the tithing at the very top of the budget, and we had never tithed before. This was something our pastor had talked about, and it scared me to tell you the truth. We had decided that we would do 5%, so we did the 5% giving to the church at the top of our budget, and that was working for us. During this time, there was something that came up through the public health department, it was just the opportunity where it just kind of fell in my lap where I was able to make quite a bit of money doing an extra job during my summer months. Since I work as a school nurse, I have that time off, so having that fall into our laps, that was definitely a God thing. And speaking towards that tithing, the very last class is about giving, and that's the 13th week. We were feeling pretty good about our 5%, and during that class Dave talks about how it's not a true tithe unless it's 10%. That was a gut check for me because I'm thinking, 'Oh boy, here I thought that we were doing the tithe, then we're not really.' So he'd given us a bunch of scripture to go home and read, and so my husband and I went home and we did read through those scriptures, and I felt convicted and I think he did too. We discussed this and we decided to do the 10%. Looking back at that, I think that we probably could have looked at it as we could have paid this debt off faster, but yet that money is not ours, 100% of it is God's. He's just generous enough to let us keep 90% of it and give 10% back to the church. So learning to trust in God through this whole process and not a piece of plastic, you know, cutting up credit cards, it caused a lot of anxiety on my part because that was always the thing that we fell back on. That was one of the first things that we did was got rid of those credit cards and we weren't using them anymore, and we just needed to trust in God to provide, and he did above and beyond every single month.

One of the things that I'm kind of picking up and noticing in your story is that you and your husband had to do a lot of communicating and that you all weren't afraid to make adjustments. You started off for example at 5% tithing and then you had a gut check and you all discussed, well maybe we should do 10%. So just talk about the importance on this journey for you all to maintain open lines of communication and how did that play a part in your success with this goal?

Communication is a huge part of a strong marriage, and Dave talks about that too, how so many divorces are caused by money problems and how that was kind of a side effect of when he started Financial Peace was seeing marriages strengthened. It does cause you to do that because you have to sit down and you have to talk about those things, your common goals and your common interests. It really did, you know, going through the growing pains of it and those fights and my tears, it was worth it in the end because of that need for communication.

Great. Were there any obstacles that you guys had to overcome during this debt-free journey process?

Yes. Our son was, I think he was a little over a year old at that time, maybe not quite a year old. I remember him having a surgery at age one, age two, and age three, and this was all while we were working on paying off this debt. We have always had a high deductible health insurance plan, so having to pay those high deductibles every single year for three years definitely slowed us down a little bit there. Some appliances in the home that broke and had to be replaced, just those things. Dave talks about how Murphy moves in, and if you're not prepared for those emergencies, they happen. I felt that as we moved along, we were better prepared for those. In the past, had we not been going down this path, those would have been huge fights and huge arguments. But when they came up, it was just a little bump in the road, like, 'Hey, we can take care of this, it might slow us down a little bit, but we don't have to get the credit cards back out, they don't have to have payments to the hospitals and all of that.'

Now, I mean, those are not only from a monetary standpoint difficult, but you're talking about your child and surgeries three years in a row, so I'm sure that there was the emotional piece behind that as well. What do you think was kind of some of the important factors that you think help you all to stay motivated enough not to get up, not to go off course, not to stray from the plan, and to keep moving forward even when these obstacles arrived? Talk about how you were able to maintain your motivation.

I always think baby steps, and that's taught in the plan as well as you work through the baby steps. I remember the first month just being ecstatic that we had less than $20 to put towards an extra credit card payment. Looking back at that, $20, that's just a little bit, but back then it was so much. All those little things that we looked at, and it really is a snowball effect. So every month I kept track of this is how much money that we've paid off, this is how much debt we have left to pay off, and it was really awesome to see those numbers start coming together and seeing the progress that we had made, and not seeing us go backwards because we weren't going back into debt. So we kept moving forward. As we paid off that first debt, we took that payment and we applied it to the second one, and that became bigger, and then the interest became less. My school loan was one that really, really made me mad, so every time I looked at that bill and I'm looking at this is the interest that I'm paying every month, and looking at that interest go down of what my payments were being applied to, that was an encourager too. I'm a runner, and at that time I wasn't running hardcore, and then as I progressed through a 5K and a 10K and a half marathon and a marathon, it really is all those baby steps. You don't start off with running a marathon, you start off by running a block, and then running a half a mile, and then running a mile, and then it just builds. It becomes in some ways easier. I think you just become more accustomed to the strife and the pain that's associated with it, so it doesn't seem so bad.

That's great. What was the response like from your family and friends during your journey?

We did have good support in our class. Several of our close friends were taking the class, so being able to hang out with them and them understanding what we're going through and what they're doing and being able to share those experiences was great. But then there's always the outsiders looking in who think that we're absolutely crazy. Our parents were definitely encouragers for us, so that helped too. We're just fine with being weird, that's just who we are, so it wasn't too much of a hassle to be different than everybody else.

You mentioned that when your husband and yourself went through Financial Peace University, you also had another couple go through it with you, some good friends of yours. Talk about that. I think a lot of times when we interview people, they talk about having the support just from their spouse, but how was that having another couple that was going through it at the same time? You guys can chat about it, you all can talk about it and things like that. How was that support system?

That was definitely an awesome part. Even we just paid off our home in June of this year, so almost six years of this communication back and forth, like 'Hey, I just cut up a credit card,' 'Hey, I just paid off this loan,' 'Hey, I just did this.' We were cheerleaders for each other, whereas some couples may find that as bragging, and we knew that wasn't the case between us because we had that same understanding of each other and what we were trying to do.

Good. So the first part of your journey was student loans and things of that nature, then you guys took it to the next level and you went and paid off your house too?

Yes, that was awesome this year. After we did the debt except for the house, we kind of got a little lax and we did some things that we wanted to do. We went on some vacations and opened up the budget a little bit more, and we kind of lost that gazelle intensity. Last year, last summer, we went to Nashville for a work-related function, and we stopped in to see Dave Ramsey and we signed the wall for when we had paid off everything except for the house. We had driven out to Nashville, so that was a long trip in the car, it was just my husband and I. On the way home, we're having this discussion and we just decided, okay, it's gazelle intense, we are going back after this debt. This was June of 2015, and we decided by December 2016 we were going to have that house paid off. It was an amazing journey, we ended up paying off the house in June, so much faster than what we had even anticipated.

That's amazing. Now how much would that be from last June to this June in a year's time? How much was that?

Oh, over $20,000, $30,000. It's amazing.

Wow. And what did you guys do because you went through this course before and you went down this same road before, and you guys knew how to do budgeting and things like that. What did you guys do during this year in order to get that gazelle intensity back? How did you turn the switch back on?

I have a part-time health and fitness coaching business, so I put some more time and effort into that. That used to be kind of fun money, and I just decided that all that money was going towards paying off the house. So we cut the entertainment a little bit, we still didn't tighten things up as much as they probably could have been, we still enjoyed life, but all that money then, that's where it was going, was into the extra house payments.

Oh, and I think that's an important point that you bring up that needs to be made known. It's okay to pay off debt and then it's okay to have a little fun as well too. It's okay, and that's something that we definitely teach, make sure that you include some type of fun during this journey or you can literally lose your mind. So you guys had a little fun, but you also knew how to work hard, and the hard work definitely paid off. So that's amazing. So walk us through that moment when you guys paid off both times. The first time when you paid off the student loan and things like that, walk us through that moment, and then walk us through the moment when you paid off your mortgage.

The first time, the icing on the cake was really calling into the Dave Ramsey Show and being live on air and being able to share our story and how we had gotten to that point. That was a very small amount of time, during the time it didn't seem like it was, but 27 months really isn't that long. So being able to do that with my husband was pretty amazing. And then once we had paid off the house, I wanted him to be there with me when I called the bank and made that payment, but he's just like, 'Whatever.' So that part wasn't as big of a deal for him. So I called the bank and made the last payment. But then when he came home from work that night, we had his parents over and they took a picture of us in front of our house. We had actually gone and picked up our new puppy that day, she was just a two-month-old Cocker Spaniel, and we named her Ramsay after Dave Ramsey. So they took a picture of all of us in front of our house with our puppy. We've been in our house since 2002, so that was pretty awesome that we've been there since we were married and now it's completely owned, we don't have to have those payments that we send off every month.

And it's completely yours. How does that feel? How does that feel now being able to say that you own your home?

Completely freeing, really. It's freed up so much. I told you I'm a runner, so one of my goals last year was to qualify for the Boston Marathon, and I did get qualified. So to be able to pay the money for those races and pay the money for those extra shoes that training requires, and then for my husband and I to be able to fly out there in April and be able to do that race, all of these goals and dreams that we have that take some money that you have to put on hold because you're tied to debt, that's not what God's plan is for us. He wants us to be everything that we can be. Not saying that it's all about money, but our dreams and passions and desires take money, and you can't take care of other people around you when people have a need and you see that in our community. Being able to actually give to that and not wonder how we ourselves are going to pay our own bills, that's an awesome experience.

I'm motivated now. So true. So talk to us about this journey from start to finish, six years like you said to do it all, the student loans, the house, all of it. How did all of this impact your marriage?

It strengthened it. Like I said, to start off with it was rocky. I can remember those arguments and remembering this isn't the way that it's supposed to be. But you really have to get into the hard times and experience that to really be able to live out the good times. Looking back on every single budget that we've done, we still do a budget even though you're financially free, it doesn't mean you can just go and spend whatever every month. It's written out on paper, there's more wiggle room there, and so that allows more freedom between the two of us. We don't have to talk about every little thing like we're going to go and spend money on this, it's in the budget. So it's just freeing all around, for our marriage, for our friendships, for our family, everything.

So what's the biggest life lesson that you learned during this entire process?

Trust. Just one of my favorite verses is Jeremiah 29:11, that God knows the plans for us and they're not to harm us, they're to prosper us. Just trusting in Him to provide. It's not about the stuff, the stuff that you're not going to take with you, it's about the relationships and the love that you have for each other. When we are financially free, being able to provide for ourselves, for our family, and the people around us, I think that's what He's intended us to do.

Awesome. Now we love to help our audience to continue to self-educate themselves in their knowledge of financial literacy. So what are some book recommendations that you will offer up to them to help them get their finances in order?

I love to read, so I did a lot of reading during this time too. Anything by Dave Ramsey or his daughter Rachel Cruz, those are great books. The Millionaire Next Door, The Millionaire Mindset, The Monk and the Merchant, those have probably been some of my favorites. The One Thing was a really good book too.

Awesome. Yeah, we'll make sure that we have links to those in the show notes, so you definitely want to check that out. Now Jackie, talk to that person right now that they've heard your story and prior to listening to your story they were a little bit discouraged saying, 'Oh my gosh, I don't know if I can do this,' but now listening to your story they're saying, 'Okay, maybe there's hope.' What would you say to them?

Take it with the baby steps. You don't have to go at it all at once. Like I said, that first month just freeing up that less than $20. If you stay consistent in the little things, they're going to become the big things. So if you can focus on one thing, maybe it's contacting your utility companies and seeing if you can get on a different plan and lower that price each month. Maybe it's using two coupons every time you go to the store, or maybe it's not going out to eat during a month, packing your lunch. Just those little things add up. So don't get so caught up in the details of 'I have this much debt to pay off and I want it gone now.' You really just have to be consistent in the little things.

Wow, great words of encouragement, Jackie. Your story is truly inspirational, and we're so glad that you took some time out of your schedule to share with our audience today. Thank you so very much.

Thank you. Thank you guys for asking me.