“We have a lot to talk about when I get home,” was all his text message said.
A lot was riding on this election for our family, and when a decision was called, it didn’t fall in our favor. We had seen this coming, but I still felt a sense of “Can this really be happening?”
When my husband got home that evening, he proceeded to tell me that his company was shutting down, and he would be out of a job in 2021. He walked me through the plans that he and his coworkers would be executing over the next two months in order to get everything finalized.
And when he was finally finished detailing all of his work tasks, I started giggling.
I’m not sure why I felt that laughter was an appropriate response in this moment. After all, my husband had just informed me that his good-paying job with benefits that were carrying our family was disappearing into thin air. I had already made my plans to quit teaching at the end of the school year, and we have another baby on the way. And yet, I laughed.
His grim demeanor cracked and a smile slid across his face. He was relieved to see I wasn’t freaking out.
Why wasn’t I freaking out? I should have been freaking out.
I wasn’t freaking out because I knew the status of our finances. Now, don’t get me wrong — our finances aren’t good. We’ve really racked up the credit card debt over the last six months, and our Dave Ramsey-ing has been accidentally put on hold for about a year. I’ve even practically drained our emergency savings on things that probably weren’t actual emergencies.
This layoff will also create some financial pitfalls for us. My husband will lose access to his company vehicle, meaning we probably can no longer feasibly handle being a one-vehicle family. Our horses will lose their home, so now we need to find somewhere to board them, and that isn’t cheap. We may even have to face the tough decision of selling them.
However, the details about our money status were completely transparent. It wasn’t a mystery. I knew roughly how much debt we were in (too much), what our monthly bills amounted to, and how much extra we could put away each month. Just having that knowledge of our financial situation was comforting, even if our finances themselves were not so warm and snuggly.
We will probably have to tighten our belts this Christmas, and our monthly budget has already received an intense makeover. At the same time, we are so blessed that we even have until the first of the year, and we are making the most of every day and every paycheck we have left. My husband is a hard worker, and he will likely have no trouble finding work elsewhere. I am aware of how fortunate we are, and I am extremely grateful.
Today’s lesson: get your finances in check now before you are forced to get them under control. It can be scary to look at them when you know you’re hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. No one likes to see that. But if you know where you’re at and you know the steps you have to take to make it better, it will make an unexpected situation seem like much less of an emergency, even if you haven’t yet accomplished all of your financial goals.
