Wednesday, December 29, 2010

It all started with the tuna

I started my adult life in 1997.  I graduated high school and was taking some collage classes, saved some money and moved into my first apartment in the big city of Phx to live closer to my boyfriend.  He had come over to help set up my electronics and we had just come back from doing some shopping when I noticed my first msg on my answering machine.  He pushed play and I heard my Dad telling me about a great tuna sale at Fry's.  This was it, a glimpse at my future because I come from a frugal family and this is just the advice a fellow penny pincher would call about.  My boyfriends reaction was "hey, that is a good deal" I sighed in relief because he could have said "what a weird thing to call about." 
We have now been married for 12 years and he is just as excited as I am when I tell him about how much I saved at the store.  Everything my parents taught me about being frugal really got us through some tough times in our life.  We moved back to our hometown with only $5 in our pocket and no jobs.  We sold our belongings and got by until we both found jobs.  We made affordable meals and brought them to work with us.  We had NO extra spending money but we were happy as can be. 
After the first couple of years of our marriage I started spending more and not worrying about every penny like I used to.  Bobby had a great job as a beer distributor and I had my dream job as a medical assistant in a surgical office.  We were making great money and we found ourselves buying whatever we wanted at the grocery store, our home had big screen TVs, game systems, new furniture and we both had brand new vehicles.  We took trips to Mexico, Catalina Island and went to Vegas a couple of times a year.  This is great but I still wanted to start a family at some point and we had a great amount of debt.
We started changing the way we lived and started planning for our future.  We managed to get our credit cards paid off just in time for our family to grow (by two).

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