Julie Gumm - Author

Blessings in Broken Teeth & Hailstorms

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A couple of weeks ago while in Ethiopia Mark sent me an email message saying he had a toothache.

It was the catalyst I needed to schedule long-overdue dentists appointments for everyone. (Side note: Scheduling dentists appointments for 6 people will take no less than 45 minutes on the phone and will occupy 3 different days on your calendar.)

They got Mark in for an appointment the day after his return from Ethiopia – 2 days before he left for Haiti.

The verdict was one broken tooth and one cracked tooth. Mark then realized that it probably happened while dining on some tibs in Ethiopia – that thing he bit wasn’t “just gristle” – it was sheep bone.

The cost? $1100.

Both he and I also needed deep, numb-your-mouth, empty-your-wallet type cleanings. The kind that insurance doesn’t fully cover. Of course. The price you pay for procrastination.

$1,800 in dental work is not exactly what I dream of spending our emergency fund on. Hm, nothing I ever need to spend it on is really a dream is it. Okay, never mind.

But the beauty of having that emergency fund is that you get to react like I did when I heard the bill.

“Really? Dang, that sucks. Oh well. Guess we’ll take it out of the emergency fund.”

And it’s done.

And then something beautiful happens, in a weird way that makes you smile….

A few weeks ago Phoenix had a pretty good hailstorm with golf-ball sized hail. My MIL actually called me to make sure the kids weren’t playing outside lest they be knocked down dead 🙂

Their house got pounded. But there was not one SINGLE piece of hail where we live.

Mark’s car, however, was parked at their house because they live close to the airport. And yes, it received hail damage in the storm.

You’re probably saying “Wait, that’s MORE bad news!”

But it’s not really. You see the one nice thing about hail damage is that your insurance company assesses the damage, writes up the estimate, subtracts your deductible and CUTS YOU A CHECK. It’s up to you whether or not you fix the car with the money.

And since we pretty much drive our cars until they die, we figure someone looking to buy a $2000 Camry with 200,000+ miles is so NOT going to care about hail damage.

Total amount of our hail damage?

$1,800

After our deductible that gave us $1,300.

Now some people might chalk it up to coincidence or being lucky, but honestly, we’ve seen it happen too many times to do that anymore.

Obviously it’s not that we were unable to pay for the dental work, but to us it’s like a little hug from God saying, “I see what you’re doing. I see the financial choices you’ve made. This is my blessing.”

What Financial Freedom Brings

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So from July 2005 until fall of 2007 our financial goal was simple – PAY OFF THE HOUSE. We lived on about 60% of our income and paid about 40% of it to the mortgage company every month.

This took lots of discipline because really, we could have totally cheated here and there – splurged on a vacation, etc. But really we just sat down when we first moved in and came up with a figure. And THAT became our payment. Since I paid bills online I really didn’t even look at that pesky monthly payment coupon with the “real” mortgage payment. We treated our “new” payment as the minimum payment.

Of course had something dire happened we could have stopped paying extra, but in all honesty I don’t think we ever sent less than what we had planned. After all we had that nice big emergency fund, right 🙂

So sometime during 2007 (truthfully, probably long before that) God began working on both Mark and I and he began calling us to get involved with the orphan. Sometime in October during a lunch at Chipotle I sprung “SOOOO, what do you think about adopting?” on Mark.

Me, the gal who had joyously declared our family complete 4 years earlier. Ha ha!

Our adoption story is well chronicled here and if you want to read more of it, go here and then work your way forward – so I won’t go in to a ton of detail here.

But as we began to look at international adoption, and decide to adopt two kids, of course the dollar signs got bigger and bigger and bigger.

But then we realized something – within a couple of months the house would be paid off.

And all that money that we had been sending to Wells Fargo? Well what better place for it to go?

It was then that we began to get the first glimpse of how our new found freedom gave God more and more room to work miracles in our lives and open us up to adventures we never knew possible.

But God had another lesson he wanted us to learn even more….

…to be continued

Taking Advantage of The Housing Boom

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The next huge step in our financial journey really came in 2004 when the housing market in Phoenix went absolutely crazy.

The house that we bought for $199,900 over a year earlier was suddenly worth about $350,000. Crazy right? So of course Mark starts talking about selling and I start rolling my eyes at him.

At this point we’ve been married 11 years and moved 7 times. I was tired of moving. Plus I loved our house and our neighborhood.

And, as I was quick to point out, what was the point of moving when everything was hugely over inflated.

So we did some research and began to look at new housing developments that were a little further west (the city of Phoenix just keeps spreading out) and had not yet peaked like the rest of the city.

And I learned something. I shouldn’t look at model homes unless I want to move. Because of course once you look you find something you love.

It didn’t take us too long to decide to make the leap and we signed on the dotted line for the construction of a new home. We downsized a bit (going from 3300 sq ft to 2700 sq ft) and after our construction options I think our final sticker price was $215,000.

They told us construction would take 6-8 months.

It took about 12.

Of course all that time we were praying that the market would hold because we weren’t going to put our current house on the market until we were closer to the move time. The market had been so crazy that houses were literally being bought within hours and I was NOT going to have to deal with a whole temporary move thing.

When it finally came time to sell we listed the house and sold it within a few days for $385,000.

From the proceeds we held back money for movers (my stipulation although we packed all the boxes ourselves), paint, landscaping, window treatments, etc.

But everything else was spent on the down payment which left us with a $65,000 mortgage.

And then we started to do some math. By this time we were making more money and we had continued to keep our budget pretty simple so we moved money around and figured out that by dumping everything extra at it, we could pay off the mortgage in 2 1/2 years.

And so we cheated. We totally skipped baby steps 4 & 5 and went straight to paying off the mortgage. We were so motivated because we could see the light at the end of the tunnel and could almost grasp total financial freedom.

Only later would we realize how important that freedom would be.

…to be continued