The TFF Story

If you missed the first part of this story, you can read it here.

Today we’re backing up a little bit in the story.  Just a year before I started The Frugal Find our youngest son, Travis was born.  Everything with the pregnancy was perfect, it was just 2 weeks before my due date and I was in labor.  With my first three children I was 2 weeks late (and induced) so this was a little different but I was ready to be done in the heat of August. I didn’t think twice about it.  I was well within a safe delivery range so the doctors let my delivery progress.  When my son was born, there was no crying.  Everything was silent.  It took me a minute or so to realize something was wrong.  Immediately he was rushed away and I began the excruciating wait to find out what was going on and if he was even alive.  It was probably only minutes, I can’t remember but it felt like an eternity.

When I finally got to see him, I realized just how sick he was.  The diagnosis wasn’t clear yet but his blood pressure was skyrocketing and he wasn’t able to breath on his own.  His lungs appeared to be underdeveloped so he was put on an artificial breathing machine.   We were in a waiting game at this point, trying different medications to bring down his blood pressure and keeping his breathing stable.  They had him sedated so that his body could heal without having to work as much.  Days past by and we scrubbed in and out of the NICU hundreds of times.  My husband was working and I had 3 other kids at home to juggle and it was my daughter’s first day of Kindergarten.  I went back and forth as often as I could and sat by his side.  He has being tub fed so I had to pump in the meantime, in hopes that when he was stable he might want to and know how to nurse.

Our faith was tested and strengthened like we could have never imagined through this journey.  Then it happened.  In the middle of the night I got a call about a week after he was born.  I was told he wasn’t going to make it through the night and I needed to rush over to be with him.  I called our Pastor, he lived near the hospital and he got there before I did.  Against doctor’s orders he put his hands inside the incubator and touched his body and prayed for his life.  An xray needed to be done to find out what had happened and why he took a turn for the worse.  A nurse who we will forever be thankful to, was giving my son oxygen with a small handheld pump  as the doctors told her to leave the room during the xray.  She knew he wouldn’t survive without the oxygen and continued to pump while they did the xray.  When I arrived they had stabilized him!   They found out that his left lung had collapsed due to a week spot that had burst because of the pressure of the breathing machine.  Tubes were inserted into drain the excess fluid and air, he was still sedated at this point.

That day and the days that followed brought miracle after miracle.  He took huge leaps in health and his body began to accept all of the treatments and began to heal!  When he was 10 days old I got to hold him for the first time and he was breathing on his own, with only the help of a little oxygen.  At 2 weeks old he began to nurse and we brought him home just a week later, when he was 3 weeks old.  He went from being what the doctors termed “the largest (at over 9lbs!) yet sickest baby in the NICU” to a perfectly healthy child with zero residual health issues.  From that day he has been the healthiest child, never to step foot back into the hospital.  Praise the Lord!

Why do I share all of this?

Because it was at this point when money had no value.  Our debt meant nothing.  The Lord had to shake me up a bit and set my perspective in the right direction.  I had shifted far too long to a woe is me mentality, feeling desperate and hopeless about our financial situation.  It seemed that there was no way out of the hole we found ourselves in, and now even with huge mounting hospital bills it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

Maybe you are in the depths of a painful and seemingly hopeless situation right now, even in that there is purpose.  Your journey, whatever it might be is ALL ABOUT PERSPECTIVE. There is a point to life and as believers we’re promised that our pain and struggles are a part of the refining process.  The fire can sure get hot, but it’s purpose is to make you all the more beautiful.  If you can look at life’s junk and say “bring it on, it will only make me a better person, it can only help me to grow in strength and resolve” then you’ll find the light at the end of the tunnel.  As I write this and as I read your comments, every single one of them – I will be praying for each and everyone of you.

The rest of our story continues on in these posts…

Part 1: How TFF started and where we are at today…

Part 2: How TFF started and where we are at today…

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Together, we’ll take life one bite at a time…

I woke up this morning knowing that this post needed to flow out of me.  My purpose is to bring you some hope.  Whatever situation you find yourself in today, just know that nothing is forever.  There is a way out and there is a light at the end of the tunnel. There could be something around the corner that could change the path your family is set on completely.  Maybe not but I want to encourage you to be content in the midst of circumstances and work towards changing your situation.   Many of you are here at TFF to make a change financially, by couponing you’re able to stay home with your kids or save up for a big purchase.  Others of you use the deals here simply to survive.  We’ve been there.  Either way you’re making change happen.

A little bit about our story.  Just out of my first year in college I found myself married and pregnant (you pick the order) and very quickly we found ourselves in debt.  We were young and were living in the NOW.  The future seemed a million years away and had little to no impact on our current day to day situation, so we spent and lived like there wasn’t a tomorrow.  No we weren’t extravgent we didn’t buy new electronics, cars, etc.  However almost worse…we simply failed to plan or budget.  We had nothing to show for our debt, nothing to sell, just payments to make. We were living on a very meager $12/hr and the little money we had didn’t stretch far enough to cover our living expenses so out came the credit cards.  We charged our gas, our food, our clothing and so on.  We managed to make our minimum payments month after month, but the payments began to grow.

A couple of babies later I found myself in bed night after night just panicking, thinking how in the world are we going to dig out of this hole.  We were making a little more money at that point and I was attempting to work from home but we were still just barely floating above water, all while still using credit cards to survive.  I felt so scared and so alone, we didn’t know who to reach out to or where to go for help.  We had made the decision that bankruptcy would never be an option but even still I had no idea what we were going to do.  We had some family members try to encourage by saying “credit card payments are just a way of life, you just have to learn how to manage them and budget for it.”   Crazy advice right?! I knew that was wrong but still didn’t know where to go from there.

All along my husband and I had been believers and faithfully attended church, even serving on staff for a couple of years myself while my husband was on the board.  However finances were never discussed and we were never equipped for the journey that life had us on.  About 5 years into our marriage we began to make simple strides towards changing our financial situation, the first was using cash only.  We pulled the credit cards out of our wallets and “put them away” however we didn’t cut them up because we needed them in case of an emergency.   Of course emergencies seemed to be around every corner. Also determining what an emergency was became an area for discussion.

We began to make small strides out of debt as we were learning how to use ONLY cash. The credit cards came out less and less and our income began to grow slowly.  We finally found ourselves at a place 8 years into our marriage where we were making exactly the amount we needed to survive on, but even still we were at bare bone levels and the only reason we had groceries in the cabinet was because of coupons.  This is when our friends started to see that even in our financial situation, we didn’t feel as hopeless any longer.  Something about a pantry full of food and enough toiletries to last a couple of months brings a peace of mind.  We began to help our friends out by putting together boxes of food for them and they began to ask how we could be doing this.  Did we get a raise, was I working more?  No, it was plain and simply coupons and learning how to use them strategically and using cash only.  That’s when I started my very first blog.  I called it “Cash and Coupons”  but in the famous Julia style I wasn’t happy with the name or the look of it so we moved here, to The Frugal Find.

I was sharing the deals I found and teaching my friends and family how to coupon by posting my shopping trips, etc.  Very similar to what I’m doing today.  Except we had no idea what would lie ahead for our family.  Something would rock our world.

To be continued tomorrow…

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