Photo Credit: Move.com (this is our first apartment)
I thought it would be fun over time to take you guys through some of the biggest mistakes we’ve made as a married couple, both financially and maybe in other ways too.
For this one I’m going to take you back to the months before we got married. They were a hustle and bustle for many reasons, one BIG reason that we’ll get into another time possibly. For now, I want you to imagine a very young couple 18 & 20 years old trying to figure out life on our own for the very first time. I’d like to say we were spreading our wings, leaving and cleaving, but that didn’t happen until almost 8 years later. That’s another story.
Our first apartment. You see I wanted the best for our new life as a married couple, the best that we could possibly afford. We were young and so many of my priorities were out of order. At the time we were both working and I think financially we were “floating”, meaning our heads were above water. So of course mistake number 1 was planning based on our current income at the time. We saw these lovely new apartments in a very nice part of town and of course we needed our first place to be ‘lovely’ and new. Safety was also a concern, but of course we know that any area can be unsafe. The Mayor over at Claycord shared a very disturbing story just recently about our very first apartment. Now there is nothing wrong with wanting to live in a nice place or having nice things if you can afford it. However, you see we couldn’t because we didn’t understand how much life would cost. Sure it worked out on paper, but paper isn’t life.
So we embarked on our first lease, little did we know that we would pay more in rent for that apartment than we would have ever paid again in the 9 years we’ve been married. I haven’t mentioned how SMALL that apartment was, with just over 600 square feet. You see with experience comes wisdom, and so move after move we added to our “must have” list and learned to live within our means. Of course we’ve also learned that from the outside things might look nice but that apartment was built for that reason alone, it wasn’t functional and from the very beginning had started to fall apart here and there. Praise the Lord he knew we wouldn’t be able to do that very long, so we signed a short lease. Life changed very quickly when our first daughter was born and the decision was made for me to stay home with her. Our first wise decision, but it would surely be a tough one financially for years to.com/e. More to this story another time…
So can you relate to this mistake? Have you made a similar one? I think it’s so important to be open and willing to share our flops with each other, not necessarily here in thecomments section but in real life – after all that’s how we grow and learn. if you’re willing I think it would be great to share some lessons you’ve learned in life that you wish you’d knew how to handle early on. I’m sure there are many thing we’d all have done differently if we could.
