We got married with no money. I don't mean we were tight. I mean we were in $60,000 of debt and not even making $60,000 a year.
There was no runway. No savings account. No "once we're in a better position." We just looked at each other and said — let's do it. Let's stop waiting for conditions that might never come.
We weren't being reckless. We were making a choice. The choice was: we're not going to let what we don't have stop us from building what we want.
That became the pattern for everything.
We homeschooled our girls with no money and no formal training. We figured it out as we went. Found free resources. Leaned on community. My mother-in-law moved in with us — which, if you asked a room full of men to raise their hand if they'd want their mother-in-law living with them, you'd hear crickets. But we didn't focus on the awkwardness. We focused on the why. The girls would have their grandmother close. We'd have help. She'd have family. It was mutually beneficial, so we made it work.
We signed up for a timeshare we couldn't really afford because we wanted our family to have vacations together. And it took us two years to save up enough points for the first trip — a week in Myrtle Beach in the winter. The whole family came. My parents, her mom, cousins, everyone. We would never have had that experience if we'd waited until we could "afford" it. We did it anyway, and those are memories our kids will carry forever.
My wife has a line she said once that I've never forgotten: "Everybody's got a line. I reached my line. That was fucking it."
She wasn't talking about money or business. She was talking about the moment she decided she was done living a life that wasn't working. No plan. No safety net. Just — I'm not doing this anymore. And then she did something about it.
That's the thing nobody talks about. Every story you hear about someone who built something — a business, a family, a life they're proud of — there's a moment in that story where the conditions weren't right. Where the math didn't work. Where anyone with common sense would have said "wait."
And they didn't wait. They did it anyway.
I'm not telling you to be irresponsible. I'm telling you to stop using "not ready" as a reason to stay stuck. Because you will never feel ready. The money will never be enough. The timing will never be perfect. And if you keep waiting for everything to line up, you'll be waiting forever while the life you want keeps happening without you.
We focused on the why, not the how. The how figured itself out because it had to. But the why — the reason we were doing any of it — that's what kept us moving when everything said we should stop.
If you know why you're doing it, the rest is just problem-solving. And you've been solving problems your whole life. You're better at it than you think.
Stop waiting. Do it anyway.
