At the tail end of my last post I mentioned that not all things can be planned for and somethings are still going to have to be paid for with money. that. should. go. to. student. loans…I’m cringing over here right now…
The beginning of this month we praised the Lord for the $8,000+ student loan we paid off! I’m still thanking God over here for that one! Can I get an AMEN!?!?!
We are called to trust the Lord in the more than we expected and the oh crap this really sucks. So here I am deciding to trust Him when things aren’t looking the way I hoped for…Taxes, car trouble, and a husband going back to school are all costing a lot of money that we planned to spend on paying off student loans.
After paying off the loan at the beginning of February, we were all pumped to start saving for our next loan (about $9,500). I had grandiose dreams of paying it off in 2 or 3 months and was even dreaming of the ways God would bring us the extra money. In reality and with the largest amount we are able to save monthly it would take us about four months to pay off (with perfect saving and no divine intervention). Then the unfortunate news started to roll in…the first one we were taken mostly by surprise…
Every year that we have been married we received $1,000 – $4,000 back in tax returns. I, being my nervous, worse case scenario self (I like to call this realism), worried that this year might not be the same, but that was mostly in the back of my mind and thought God said to trust Him…maybe we will get a ton of money back to pay off another loan! A girl can dream…maybe you are starting to see the split personality I live within… Well as you might now expect, my negative side won out and we owed money! A lot of money, well to me at least, $1,100. That is almost half of what we put extra towards student loans each month!!! I may have freaked out for a second, but I am glad to say my next thought was, God is still faithful, He has us! And I have continued to believe Him most of the time.
The other two things are much less of a surprise, but nonetheless suck! In December we decided that Luke would go back to school to get his computer engineering degree…my man is a smartie pants! While I am super excited that he has found what he wants to do and I am so thankfully he is pursuing something he loves to support our family, I found myself a little nervous. Between the up front cost of school and the LARGE amount of time and energy it takes to work full time and go to school full time, I worried for us financially and relationally. But God made it a rather clear answer to our prayers for direction. (PS I say up front cost because Luke’s job will pay back the money we spend on school eventually. Yay! What a blessing!) So he began school this semester and we paid for all of his classes before we even paid off the loan, which was amazing! But after we paid the loan a bunch of unexpected school related costs started to spring up that we hadn’t planned on and it started to suck up a lot of money. Thank the Lord and Dave Ramsey for our $1,000 emergency fund or else we would have been in trouble! There went a few more hundred dollars…
Then it started to warm up…you know those couple of warmer days last week or maybe the week before…what can you do spring in February…thanks California…well we already knew that Luke’s air conditioner wasn’t working and then it warmed up. So we decided that needed to be fixed ASAP since his truck is our “good” car. Next he had a problem with his exhaust… it had to be fixed. Just like that another few hundred dollars gone.
If you were totaling that up with me you can see our emergency fund is almost gone and we will be paying a large chunk of that $2,800 we wanted to save for the loans into paying back the taxes we owe. We will also be paying the emergency fund back because we need that thing for the next emergency. No money saved towards the loans for March…:( (Side note: all of the money we put toward student loans comes from the beginning of the month when we both get paid BTW.)
Clearly this is not what I imagined or had planned, but I am going to trust the Lord and believe that He is still faithful. Please believe and pray for that belief with me.