The budget plan we’d created for the past few weeks had gone fairly smoothly, though we’d made a few rookie mistakes. We’d factored in only $100 for the month’s food and forgot to include things like toilet paper and laundry detergent, which had us frantically reshuffling the budget in the middle of the month. I’d finished the Total Money Makeover audiobook, then returned to the library to pick up a hardback copy for Nat to read through.

During the last week of January, we created our budget for February (yes, we remembered the toilet paper) and decided to start working our way through the Seven Baby Steps — which meant that we needed to start by cutting up any credit cards we had.

I picked up the furniture store card while Nat looked up the company’s phone number. Within five minutes, he paid off the small balance remaining on the card and closed the account. Then, I used the scissors to cut the card into tiny pieces and threw them into the trash.

“Okay,” I said, “No more credit cards. Ever. We’re lucky it was a small balance.”

“Agreed,” said Nat, “That definitely could have been worse.”

We both knew families struggling with thousands in credit card debt, and we were grateful to be able to get rid of ours.

“Now on to Baby Steps 1 and 2,” I said, my voice wavering a little. Baby Step 1 was to save a mini-emergency fund of $1,000. In our case, it actually meant draining our savings account down to $1,000. One day earlier, Nat had moved all but $1,000 of our savings into our checking account so that we could use the money to get a head start on Baby Step 2.

Baby Step 2 was to start the “debt snowball” process, paying off all debts outside of our mortgage, from smallest balance to largest. After paying off the small credit card balance, our next largest debt — and our next goal for the debt snowball — was our car loan. I checked how much we had left in the account after paying off the furniture store credit card, then pulled up the car payment site.

“I don’t know,” I muttered, “Maybe we should keep more than $1,000 in the account. I mean, what if something bad happens, chas v’shalom?”

As a child, I was always taught to save as much money as possible and never spend large amounts in one fell swoop. The magnitude of what we were doing was hitting me, and I was scared.

“Getting cold feet?” Nat asked. “Remember what Dave says in the book… even if something were to happen, we’d still have to make our loan payments, so we’re doing the right thing by reducing our debt as quickly as we can.”

“Right,” I agreed, though I didn’t feel any better. “I know this is the first step to getting out of debt, but… I just… I worked so hard to save up that money. Maybe we should transfer some of it back to savings.”

“Remember our goal,” Nat reminded me “We’re doing this to help build our future family and be able to give more tzedakah, im yirtzeh Hashem. We’re not in charge of our money — Hashem is. We’re doing this to be able to do more mitzvos in the future, and Hashem always helps us when we work to do His Will. Isn’t that what you told me, years ago?”

“That’s right,” I said, buoyed by my husband’s encouragement.

He was referring to a piece of Torah my rav had shared when I was a shiny new 16-year-old baalas teshuvah. I had come to him at one point, frustrated that I wasn’t able to take on as many mitzvos as I felt I should, due to the constraints of living with my non-observant family. My rav had reassured me that as long as I kept learning with the intention to be shomeres mitzvos as soon as I was able, Hashem would help me by making it possible for me to keep more mitzvos. I followed his advice, then ended up graduating high school a year early and going to a Jewish college, allowing me to fully keep Shabbos and kashrus and to eventually meet my husband.

Encouraged, I turned to the car payment site and started typing quickly, entering the payment that would drain our savings and knock out the majority of the loan. Nat and I both exhaled the breath we’d been holding, then looked at each other.

“Your hands were shaking,” my husband observed, “But now they’re not.”

“I know,” I said. “I feel calm now that it’s over. I feel like we’re on a mission together, and it just got real.”

“What’s the next step in our mission?”

“We get as intense as possible about paying off the rest of this car loan, then we attack our student loans until they’re gone, too. Then, it’s on to Baby Step 3.”

“Lead the way, captain!”

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 860)