A day without debt, part two.
The second post in a series on debt.
This is the second part of a series telling my debt story. You can read the first post here.
One year later, we were completely debt-free and living in our newly-purchased townhouse. Financially, things were fantastic. We were no longer living pay check to pay check due to the sizeable down payment we were able to put down on the house, and we finally felt free.
Living without debt for the first time in my adult life was a new feeling, one I was not familiar with but one I was enjoying. I vowed that I never would never be in debt again.
But, as we all know, life doesn’t usually go to plan.
In March of 2020, alongside the rest of the world, our lives were upended. My spouse had started his own business and was now self-employed doing a job that was in extremely high demand because of the pandemic. I was stuck at home with a non- napping two-year-old and a challenging five-year-old.
For the first four months of the pandemic, it was just me at home alone with the kids. The social fabric of my life that had made early motherhood manageable had completely disintegrated. Due to the stress of mothering in isolation, a spouse who worked fifteen-hour-days, and the ever-shifting pandemic regulations in our province, I was drowning.
Our marriage was strained; something needed to change. One day I was driving with the kids strapped into their car seats, and I had a revelation—we needed to move. My soul was crying out for change, and I needed to heed the call.
It wasn’t the financially responsible thing to do, it wasn’t the typical trajectory that business owners take, it wasn’t conventional, but we decided to move to British Columbia. With the promise of a fresh start, housing, community, and the West Coast lifestyle, we sold our inheritance-purchased house along with nearly everything in it and headed west.
The move
When we arrived on Vancouver Island, we felt like the luckiest people alive. We had money in the bank from selling our home, we had monthly payments coming in from the sale of the business for the next two years, and we were where we wanted to be. We had dreamed of returning to the West Coast since we got married, and we were finally back.
But, slowly things started to unravel. The housing arrangement we were promised fell through, the current housing set-up we were in was no longer serving us as a family, and the monthly payments from the sale of the business had halted.
Desperate to find a housing solution, I emailed landlord after landlord and looked up listing after listing. Despite being comfortable with non-traditional housing arrangements like apartments, tiny homes, and basement suites, after six months of looking my search was still coming up empty. After exhausting all of our options, we felt that we had no other choice but to return to the town that we were so eager to leave so that we could find a place to live.
Heading back east
So, disheartened and callused from our experience, we travelled back east. We found a rental in a few days and moved straight in. Since we sold everything before moving west and were living in furnished housing, we had no furniture. With our online-ordered mattresses set up on the floor, I set about decorating our townhouse. Despite my earlier resolve to never enter into debt again, we were in over $20,000.00 of debt in a few month’s time.
Following traditional personal finance advice, we used our savings to tackle our debt leaving us with remaining debt and no savings. Our debt continued to rise due to the aftermath of our move, my spouse’s low income, and frantically rising inflation. Before we knew it, we had over $40,000.00 of debt.
Admittedly in retrospect, a lot of this spending was coming from a place of pain. I was humiliated that our decision to move hadn’t worked out. I was exhausted from moving twice in one year with small children. I was fearful of the future and disappointed that we had come so far financially, just to be right back where we were before.
So, to this day, I am still in debt. With $43,000.00 on our lines of credit, we plod forward. In the past few years, the balance has dipped and risen due to life’s circumstances—more tuition costs, some impulsive purchases, unexpected fees, furniture changes, overspending, inflation, and two overseas vacations.
This debt, it seems, will be around for a few years more. While we work to pay off these high-interest loans, my feelings vacillate between shame and apathy. Sometimes I am thankful for our debt because it has enabled us to make changes in our lives when our situations and souls demanded it.
At other times, I have raging hatred toward our debt because it has prevented us from saving and feeling free. Some days I wonder how I will feel when our debt is paid off and if we will ever reach that day. Sometimes I feel utter shame and humiliation for being in such debt as I approach the age of forty. I feel behind my peers. I feel like a fraud. How have I still not figured this out yet?
Sometimes I worry what our kids think about us having debt. As they become adults and have children of their own, will they look back on how we were as parents and consider us bad with money? Will they think of us as irresponsible and hedonistic? Will they judge our financial decisions harshly?
Some days I don’t feel anything towards our debt. I feel nothing towards it—it’s just there.
Just like it’s always been.