One of the most common questions we get about having no credit score is, "How will I get a mortgage without a credit score?" I have to admit that 6 years ago when my husband and I cut up and closed our last credit card account, I was a little nervous. Having been raised in the you-must-have-a-credit-score capital of the world, I didn't know what it meant to have no "credit" to my name. Being newly married, my husband and I were all-in on paying off our debt, cutting credit out of our lives, and changing our family tree.
Neither of us came from a credit and debt happy family but we were taught in school, college, and just about everywhere else that being an adult meant having a credit card, car payment, and mortgage. At college orientation, getting a student loan was just another paper to fill out and sign along with the heaps of admission papers and class schedules. There was no discussion whatsoever about options for paying for school or what taking on thousands of dollars of student loan debt meant. I was blessed to have about half of my college paid for by my parents and even more blessed that God had steered me towards attending a state college, UCCS, that cost about ten percent of my dream college, Stanford.
The next logical step in life was to get a credit card and start using it for gas so I could build up my credit score. I paid it off each month and saw my credit score slowly creep up. This plan worked really well until Christmas came around and I had no money. It was an "Emergency" and I had to buy gifts for my loved ones. Out came the credit card to save the day, so handy and simple! This was thankfully not long before I discovered Dave Ramsey on the radio. My husband and I went into our marriage with $20,000 in student loans and around $2,000 in credit card debt. This was not horrible but still a big monster for two newlyweds and new college graduates. We had a mountain to climb but we were prepared to climb it.
We had a credit card cutting party in our danky, cold first rental home with the baseboard heating and black widows. We agreed that we did not want to owe anybody anything ever again! We did not want to be slaves to anything, we wanted to be free to serve God without other "masters" (Proverbs 22:7 "The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender"). We got on a very tight budget and spent our first 8 months of marriage completely obliterating our debt. We paid everything off by living on almost nothing, doing almost nothing but working, and selling anything we could. I worked over 50 hours per week, James got a promotion, we cleaned an office on the weekends, we sold clothes, games, DVDs, and anything else we could get our hands on. We kept the heat low, never ate out, and instead of going out with friends we had them over for crock pot meals and games. It was so hard but oh so rewarding when we paid that last penny to NelNet and had debt out of our lives for good.
Now we could take a breath and enjoy a little bit of our money, but we had another big goal in mind...
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