I am a forty-five year old woman. I am married. I have three kids - a daughter who is 12, a daughter who is 10, and a son who is 7. We have two cars that are paid off. We have no credit card debt. We have faithfully paid our mortgage for the last 12 years, 2 years on our condo, and 10 years on our home. We are currently not underwater in our home, and could sell our house at market value and still make a small profit. My husband is self-employed as a painter, and I work as a freelance/contract technical writer and trainer. Living the American dream, right? Well, not exactly. For most of my adult life, at least since I got married, I have probably been either middle class or lower middle class.
OK, let's back up a little bit.
We got married in 1995. I got married when I was 29, and I had just finished a year of graduate school in English - Writing. My husband was, ahem, a few years younger than I was (23, so not 18 or anything LOL) and he had also just finished his first year of graduate school. We had both used federal student loans to pay for the bulk of our graduate school expenses.
I quit going to school and went to work full-time, but the pay was just barely over minimum wage. My husband had a graduate assistantship with a stipend, but between the two of us, we were making under $20,000 a year. I had benefits through my job, and my husband had health insurance through school. We each had some credit card debt, but not much. I'd say between the two of us, it was under $2000, but when you are only making $15,000 total, it was still a challenge to pay the credit card debt and our other expenses (rent, utilities, my student loans, and a car payment.) My husband graduated with a masters degree in English - Literature.
After a year, so in 1996, I took a job as a technical writer in downtown Chicago. It was my first "real" salaried job. I wasn't making GREAT money, $30,000 a year, but compared to the last year, it felt like a million. My husband also got a job as a technical writer. He made less, but not a lot less. Maybe $26,000? So anyway, we had more than doubled our income. We both had full benefits through our companies. Things should have been great, right? Well, for reasons that I still don't understand, it wasn't. Part of it was housing was much more expensive, and so was gas, and I also took the train into downtown. Insurance was more. Everything was more. We started using our credit cards more to help pay for things when we didn't have the money. And after another two years, we left Chicago to move back to central Illinois. Things would be cheaper there. We could get ahead.
In 1998, I got a job in Springfield as a technical writer, making the same as I was in Chicago, with full benefits. My husband had decided that he didn't want to do technical writing anymore. He wanted to go back to broadcasting (he got his bachelor's in broadcast communications.). He got a job at a local radio station with full benefits. After a few months, he was promoted to news director. But even so, the pay was pretty awful. Right around 20,000. And his schedule was awful too. I was working 8-5 and he was working 3 am to 11 am or something like that. We never saw each other . And I almost never cooked because it would only be for one. We bought lots of convenience/fast food. We bought a second car. Housing was less, insurance was less, but now we had a second car payment. We had decided to get a second car because he was living in a different city and working a different schedule. We made very little progress on our debt. And the money I was putting in my retirement fund (a 401k) was losing money every month. And we had discovered that we had infertility issues and I was going to the doctor frequently.
And then in early 1999, I got a job as a trainer at the University in Normal, IL and my husband got a job as a news reporter at a radio station in town. My pay was just a little more than my last job, and my husband's was about the same. I was newly pregnant with our first. We decided to buy instead of rent and we bought a 2 bedroom condo. This was one of the only times in our married life where things seemed to be going ok financially. We had decided to just cash out the money from my 401k from my last job because it was losing so much money. It wasn't much anyway - after penalties, it was less than $2000, and we used it to get some furniture for our new place. Our mortgage was much less than we had been paying in rent. My husband still had an irregular schedule, but we did see each other more often than we had before. We had myself and my husband (and in September of 1999, our baby) on my health insurance. Our premiums were very reasonable. I had a retirement fund through the state. My husband had benefits. We were paying regularly on our student loans. And then a week before our daughter was born, my husband got fired.
Thankfully, he was able to get a job quickly. He got a job as the Public Safety/Media Relations manager at the Fire Department for the city we lived in. He would work a traditional work day for the first time in a few years. He was making about the same money I was now. I still had my good benefits. My husband had good benefits through his work- with a caveat. It was a self-managed plan for health and dental benefits. Which meant that my husband didn't have to pay anything for his benefits, but if he added any dependents(1 or 50, it didn't matter), we would have to pay for the entire premium, which was over $500, and that didn't count what you would pay for prescriptions. But no matter, we were using health and dental benefits anyway through my job anyway, and they were great, and only cost us about $200 a month for the entire family.
