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| January 2018 |
How did we get here? Raising two kids in a house that looks like a barn and making enough money to support our family by doing taxes, bookkeeping, accounting, & consulting out of our house???
I know it all sounds a little crazy, and OH what a crazy ride it has been! But really, how the heck did we get here?!?
Here is the short(ish) and sweet version:😉
Carson and I met in college in our very first accounting class. He was on the path to becoming a CPA after graduation, and I was on the path to "I want to work for myself one day and have lots of money." Haha! He has always been very practical and I have always been a BIG dreamer!
We went on our very first date on Valentines Day in 2008, and we were pretty inseparable after that (pretty annoying to all of our friends😀). Carson was planning to attend graduate school after completing his undergraduate degree so that he could get his Masters in Accounting and sit for the CPA exam. I had no real concrete plans so I decided to stick around and applied to grad school to get my MBA(luckily I got accepted after taking the GMAT a couple of times).
We both graduated with our Masters in 2011 and moved to Dallas, TX. Carson worked in a big accounting firm in Dallas and I took a job at AmeriDream working in mortgage while I tried to figure out what I really wanted to do...
We moved into our first apartment together, got engaged in 2012, and got married in Ireland in 2013! After our wedding we backpacked through Europe for a month(SUCH an awesome experience!). The entire time we were traveling, we were dreaming of the day that we could quit our jobs and travel around the world forever like gypsies :) Needless to say, we were absolutely dreading having to go back home and get back to the real world when our adventure was over.
We were both in pretty big shock once we had been working our "real" jobs for a few years, and we were not very happy. It felt like a LOT of work with very little reward. We had very little time off and we lived for the weekends. It felt to me that we did it all the "right" way and should have been super over-the-moon happy, but that was not the case! We did it all in the right order (school, graduation, good jobs, marriage) and stuck to the plan, but it didn't feel like it was the right thing.
Every spare moment we had, we dreamed of making a BIG change sometime in the future. We wanted to work for ourselves, set our own schedules, and have lots of time to enjoy our lives. The problem was, it did not feel like it was really attainable. It felt more like a dream. It also seemed like we were the only people that felt so unhappy in this "American Dream". Why was everyone else happy to exist in this daily rat race?? Maybe WE were the crazy ones...?
The biggest hurdle we had to face was our finances. How could we ever quit our jobs with all of our monthly payments? We had student loans, credit cards, two car loans, a mortgage... We felt trapped in the jobs we hated, but the truth was we had done that to ourselves. We had leveraged ourselves so much that we had no options but to stay put.
It was then that we found Dave Ramsey. Carson had always been intruiged by him, but I had never really wanted to hear about it. However, being in this place where I felt trapped changed my mind. We listened to his book The Total Money Makeover together every night, chapter by chapter. The book completely changed our attitudes and we got fired up to make some BIG changes!
We worked our butts off that year during tax season and made lots of extra money to pay off some of our debt and we lived off of almost nothing every month. No eating out. No money spent on entertainment. No new clothes. No going to Target(😩). All we did was work and budget!
We wanted to get even more crazy with this new plan so we down-graded both of our cars as much as we possibly could with the negative equity we had on them both. We both were driving our "dream cars" at the time and it was not easy to give those up. Making these changes saved us about $450 a month and we started using that extra to pay off more debt.
Next, we put our house on the market and decided we would move to a small {cheap} apartment rather than pouring extra money into our house. We had been having one problem after the next with the old "fixer-upper" that we had bought right before we got married. It was quickly becoming a money-pit that we had not been prepared to fund. We had put a lot of work into the house and it looked completely different from when we moved in. I had a feeling that we would get some equity out of it when we sold, but I had no clue what an awesome decision we were making. When the realtor told us how much to list it for, we were shocked. We had 20 showings in the first day and many offers come in. We walked away from that sale with a $55,000 check! We were so giddy walking out of that title company. I will never forget that feeling! We deposited that bad-boy and used alllll of the money to pay off debt, keeping only a small "emergency fund".
We moved into a small, old, cheap apartment on the 3rd floor (the higher up you are, the less you pay). We lived there for 4 months before I got pregnant. Things quickly got real when we had pregnancy complications and I was put on bed-rest around 20 weeks. We started looking for reasonably priced homes close-by to move in to before the baby arrived and found nothing in our budget. I stumbled across a new home development wayyyy out of the way of our jobs and convinced Carson to go look. The homes they were building were very inexpensive compared to the homes we had been looking at. The drive to both of our jobs would be much further, but we felt like this was the best option we had seen. They told us the next day that we should make a decision because prices would rise on Monday. I knew they were not lying and Carson was convinced they were just trying to get us to sign on the house. We talked and talked and talked about it and decided to DO IT! We signed the paper work and the next day all of the home prices went up by $20,000!
We moved into our house a week before our first baby was born, and we only lived there 14 months before we sold again and made $15,000 on the sale! That was a crazy 14 months with a new baby and two stressful jobs. The drive to Carson's office was terrible and he hardly saw us for months during tax season.
We were sitting on the porch one night drinking wine and watching the baby monitor when the "plan" was formed. Carson had been working his butt off for about 2 years helping running the small CPA firm he worked at. When he switched jobs from the large CPA firm in Dallas we thought the work-life balance would be better, however that was not the case. The owner of the new firm was wanted to retire and found Carson to be more-than-capable of running the firm while he traveled and worked wayyy less. Though this was very disappointing at the time with a new baby at home, it was actually what changed everything for us.
Carson gained SO much experience and confidence in his abilities while running that firm. He was involved in everything from getting new clients to billing. He had the opportunity to see all sides of the business and finally said to me that night, "I think I am ready to do it on my own". I had mentioned many times over the years that we could start our own accounting firm one day, and we had dreamed about it together lots over the years. However, this was the first time ever hearing Carson was on board! It took him a while to get there, but he was finally there and he was ready to GO!
That is when we decided to put the house on the market and move out of the city. We Fort Worth was not the place for us to start a business and it was not the place we wanted to raise our family. Our house sold quickly and we moved in with my Mom in Decatur. Moving in with your Mom when you are married and have a 1-year-old is NOT ideal, but it was the only way for us to have enough money to make our next steps. We chose yet again to make ourselves uncomfortable for a short time and sacrifice so that in the future we could be more comfortable (and now we are so glad we did).
My job was flexible at the time and I was able to work from anywhere so the move was not an issue for my job. However, Carson did have to quit his job. My salary was enough for us to live on and Carson could start the business while I worked since he no longer had a job. BUT... a wrench was thrown in the plan when Carson got a job offer from his old firm. They offered him the opportunity to work part-time (30 hours)from home exclusively. The play-it-safe part of him could not refuse the offer so he took the job.
We lived with my mom for 10 months both working 70+ hours a week in a small corner in the house. We saved a ton of money up and worked nights on our new business{after we put our 1-year-old to bed}. We officially started our accounting firm, Sands Co., in the summer of 2016. Carson worked his butt off balancing two jobs and I worked on our next move--our new home AND location of the first Sands Co. office. {It is interesting to note that the first tax season in the books for Sands Co. involved a desk in a corner of my Mom's house and a few business cards.}
I drew up the plans for a home with an attached office for Sands Co. Carson took a glimpse and it and said "good with me". Haha! I figured out all of the details to make the plans a reality {that's a whole long story in itself}, and worked on that while Carson worked on the business.
We moved out of my Mom's house in May of 2017 and both quit our other jobs to focus fully on Sands Co. in July 2017.
Here we are today, August 2018. We have added another sweet baby to our family and we have been 100% self-employed for over a year! Our business is thriving and we are on track to make more than we ever did in our old jobs in 2019! We have an awesome work-life balance and are able to spend lots of quality time with our little family 💓
I tear up a little just reading through this. It is so emotional to relive all of the steps it took to get here. It may look like it was easy from the outside looking in, but it absolutely was not. We made a lot of difficult decisions in order to get here, and i am SO HAPPY WE DID.
So to my sweet babies...if you ever wonder how you ended up living in a house that looks like a barn in Decatur Texas with two parents who work 2 feet from each other in an office by the kitchen......This is the story. This is Us 💓 I hope this makes you proud and teaches you to work toward your dreams even if they feel like they are completely impossible.
- Love Mom
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