Wendy Coneybeer

Most of us set goals, objectives that we see as better than our present situation, to work towards in our lives. When we reach these goals we feel a sense of achievment and satisfaction of completing what we were working towards. But what is the opposite of a goal? Not the opposite in the sense of not actually having a goal, but rather a low point. Something that you are fighting to avoid, like swimming against a current while fighting not to drown. I think most people refer to this as “rock bottom”, but many people don’t set these like they do their goals. Not openly anyway. We tend to be proud to advertise our goals to others, but we’re not so quick to point out that low point that we’re trying to avoid.

At this time one year ago, Chris was making the 2000 mile drive from Columbus, OH to my parents home in Phoenix, AZ. We had been kicking around the idea of moving to Arizona for quite some time, but after three years of medical issues, family drama, and helping to care for Chris’ grandmother, who passed away in our home in March of 2009, we were ready for a drastic change and felt that it was finally the right time to do it. Chris’ mom had been in Phoenix for ten years and my parents had moved out three years prior. Chris had come home from work one evening and told me that he was ready to put in his notice, put the house on the market, and make the move. I called my parents and asked if we had a place to stay for a while and they gave us an enthusiastic, “Yes!” A few short weeks later, he had my SUV packed and was on the road to The Valley of the Sun, where we had no home of our own and no source of income, to begin our new life. I stayed behind for the next six weeks to pack up our belongings while keeping my job a bit longer to give us a bit of money to live on.

We did not take the financial implications of making this move lightly. Chris was giving up a great salary as a developer for a company he had worked for over the past nine years, while I was leaving a decent merchandising position that had promising advancement potential with a major national retailer. We had purchased our Condo in Columbus six years prior in a brand new community when the housing boom was in full swing, and shortly thereafter is when the market started to crash. The condo had dropped to 2/3 of what we owed on it, and only 2/3 of the units in the community had actually been built because there were still a number of new units that hadn’t sold. The view from our balcony included the concrete foundation of a building ready to be built after a specific number of units sold. That foundation was still bare when we left. We knew that our home would probably not sell, but friends helped us clean it up like new, and we put in on the market with our realtor intending to try for a short-sale.

We also had a lot of other debt besides the condo: credit card bills, two car payments, some student loans, and a slew of other monthly fees for various services we subscribed to. Moving costs, a truck, fuel, storage unit, and various little associated expenses would push that debt up by a couple more thousand dollars too. We knew that we were taking a major risk by quitting our jobs, giving up our home, and moving into completely unknown territory, but it was something we felt we needed to do for ourselves, and we were completely in agreement that it was worth the sacrafice of comfort and security because the potential benefits outweighed the risks in our minds.

Somewhere along the way, on that drive between Columbus and Phoenix, Chris accidentally ripped a $10 bill in half. At that moment, he decided that would be our last $10, to be taped back together and used only in case of emergency. An “emergency” would be something such as if we had no other discernable source of money for gas for a job interview or for groceries. One half of the bill went into the center console of my SUV, while he saved the other half and put it in his dresser drawer at my parents house once he settled in there. Six weeks later, when I finally arrived in Phoenix and we were back together again, he sat me down and explained the significance of this $10 bill. To really make his point, after explaining to me the potential scenarios where we might have to use this money he looked at me and said, “Honey, if we have to use this, that’s when we know we’re f****d.”

That may sound like quite a harsh thing to hear, but that was the reality of the situation. The point of it, however, was not to scare me and make me freak our about our potential financial ruin, but quite the opposite. What my husband was doing was setting a point to let me know what our “rock bottom” point was that we didn’t want to hit or drawing a symbolic line in the sand to try not to cross. It was something that helped us keep our sanity and our relationship in tact while we re-built our lives from nearly the ground up. We both understood that if we weren’t yet to the point where we had to tape that $10 back together, we were still okay. It gave us peace of mind to get through a pretty tough time.

It was 11 months ago we had that conversation in our bedroom in my parents home. And things did get pretty dire for us this past year. Chris ended up starting a contract position as a developer the week after I arrived, which was a step in the right direction. But it took me nearly two months to land a job and the debt collectors were ringing our phones off the hooks for several months. We were hit with some unexpected expenses from the State of Ohio, some legal issues with Chris’ grandmothers estate, and our condo in Columbus ended up in foreclosure because we couldn’t even find anyone interested in simply looking at it for $50,000 less that what we owed on it.

Through all of it, though, we never had to tape that $10 bill back together, and that gave us the peace of mind that we were still “okay”. It was close, mind you. The bank account hovered near zero for our first couple months here, and we were lucky enough to have the flexibility of paying rent to my parents, who weren’t going to charge us crazy late fees for being late on our rent for a week or two. We lived with them for nine months in a trailer in North Phoenix while commuting, most days carpooling, to our jobs in Chandler which cost an outrageous amount in gas money every week. The vast majority of our material belongings were put in a storage unit, and are still there for now. It wasn’t the ideal situation, by any means, but we knew that we were doing our very best to make our lives better and it helped put the important things in life in perspective for us. We had, and still have, each other and our health, and that’s most important. We also have a very loving and supportive family, and have developed a group of remarkably supportive and amazing friends here. All the material things didn’t matter so much to us anymore.

After a few few months into our new life here, news would come about another unexpected expense and we would just look at each other and shrug it off. We would deal with it, and it might be difficult, but we knew that in the grand scheme of things it really just wasn’t that big of a deal. We may have just lost over a thousand dollars of money we had planned on having, but so what? We still had the truly important things in our life, and for the first time in our eight-year marriage we realized this.

One month ago we were very fortunate when Chris’ mom found a co-worker who needed to rent her vacation townhome in Mesa through December. The rental was perfect for us, and we were able to move out of my parent’s mobile home while cutting our commute by well over half the time and distance.

We are well on our way back to a comfortable, secure life again, but the one thing that I hope that never fades is the way our priorities and values shifted while we worked to get back on our own feet. Last week, to help us always remember the important things in life, we framed that $10 and put it on display in our new home as a symbol of how lucky we really are:

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