It was a normal night at our kitchen table. Two laptops open. A stack of bank statements.
Jennifer and I finally got honest about our budget, and there it was in black and white.
$1,300. On eating out. In one month.
We just sat there and looked at each other.
That number wasn't really about food. It was about two people who loved each other but were pulling in different directions with money and didn't even know it.
We got married in March of 2013. High school sweethearts. I asked her to homecoming when I was 16 and she was 17, and somehow we made it all the way to married by 23. We thought love would be the hard part. Turns out love was easy. Money was the thing that almost broke us.
Right after our honeymoon in Hawaii, we came home to two very different visions. I wanted to save. Get back to zero. Build the cushion back up. She wanted to plan the next trip. Create memories. Live a little.
Neither one of us was wrong. We just didn't know how to talk about it.
That disagreement about vacations turned into a habit. Eating out. Small purchases and conveniences here and there. It all felt harmless. Talking about the big stuff felt too hard, so we avoided it, one restaurant receipt at a time. It took actually adding it up to wake us up.
Then money got a lot harder.
There was a stretch, over three years, where our income dropped more than 60 percent. Not a bad month. Three years. And right in the middle of that valley, we welcomed our first son into the world.
I remember one night like it was yesterday.
I had signed up to drive for DoorDash so we could buy formula and diapers. It was 10pm. I sat in a restaurant parking lot for 30 minutes waiting on an order. Drove it across town. Handed it over. Drove home.
Three dollars. For an hour of work.
I sat in my car in the driveway and broke down crying. All I wanted was to provide for my family. That's it. That's all I was asking for.
I remember asking God why. Why did we have to go through this. I didn't see an end coming. I didn't know if it would be another month or another year. It felt like it would never end.
Another thing happens when you go through a stretch like this financially. Giving gets very hard.
When things were good, tithing felt natural. Joyful, even. But when the bills were bigger than the paycheck, every dollar we gave away felt like it might be the dollar that could have saved us. We had to relearn what faithfulness looked like when we had less, not just when we had more.
And on the other side of that valley, once things started working again, a different danger showed up. It wasn't pride, exactly. It was quieter than that. It was the slow creep of comfort. Nicer dinners. Bigger plans. A little more here, a little more there. We didn't feel it happening. We just knew, somewhere in the back of our minds, that all of it could disappear as fast as it came, the same way it did before. And we hadn't kept our hearts ready for that.
Maybe you know this feeling. The tension between wanting more for your family and wondering if wanting more is even the right thing to want. The awkward silence when your spouse brings up money and you'd rather talk about anything else. The guilt of giving less than you used to. The quiet fear of holding on too tight to what you finally have.
We're not writing this because we figured it out. We're writing this because we didn't, for a long time.
We are not financial experts. We don't have a formula. We don't have shortcuts. What we have is thirteen years of marriage, a valley that lasted longer than we wanted, and a night in a car crying over three dollars.
We wish someone had handed us this when we were newlyweds. Someone who had already walked through the first five to seven years and could say, here's what nobody warns you about. Someone who talked about the stuff that gets skipped over at church and never really gets said out loud anywhere else. Giving when it hurts. Fighting fair about money. Staying humble when things go well. Staying faithful when they don't.
That's what Cents of Faith is.
We believe God gave us this story on purpose, the valley and the good years both. If sharing it helps even one couple feel less alone at their own kitchen table, the way we felt at ours, that's worth it.
We don't know what your $1,300 moment looks like. Maybe it's already happened. Maybe it's coming.
Either way, we didn't want to wait until we had it all figured out to start talking about it. Because we don't. We just know what it's like to sit at that table, look at each other, and decide to stay in it together.
So pull up a chair.
Starting next week, you'll get a short letter from us every week. Real stuff about faith, marriage, parenting, and money. The kind of stuff nobody talks about out loud.
Michael and Jennifer