I transitioned to adulthood in the early 2000’s, shortly after Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover was published. My ex-husband and I had some money issues, mostly because of his spending habits and my inability to say no.
Plus, we hadn’t read the Total Money Makeover.
Between 2008 and 2010 I lost my job due to the economic crisis, had to sell my home at a 13k loss to the bank, had an extensive brain surgery that landed me a 98k medical bill, began working towards a college degree, and got divorced.
I still didn’t’ read the Total Money Makeover.
The medical debt sat in collections until I graduated college, and then things finally started looking up. I landed my first good job just weeks after graduation and started to pay towards the large medical debt. I paid thousands upon thousands of dollars and made a huge dent in the pile within a couple years. I hadn’t had a car payment, a mortgage, or a credit card in years, so I had zero good credit. The only thing on my credit report was a debt that had been sitting unpaid for five years.
So, a year or so after landing my job I purchased a car and my credit score jumped 150 points within the following year. Wahoo!
After several years of paying on my car and the medical debt, my credit score was high enough to purchase a home, so I did that, too. I paid the regular monthly payment, but thanks to the flood of people moving to Idaho in 2019 my home value skyrocketed…
