Charlotte Jones, 46, was in her late20s when her first marriage ended abruptly. “Getting on top of my finances was the most frightening and painful thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Jones recalls, even more so than the divorce and the bout of thyroid cancer during it.
“We started out in debt. We bought a house but didn’t have enough money to buy the garden hose to water the lawn. We ended with $20,000 in equity and the same in debt. He took both, and I started over,” Jones says.
The first thing Jones did was assess her situation. “Frankly this was very simple. More money was going out than coming in. So I bought one of those budget books that was categorized for phone, entertainment, gas, etc., and kept a detailed diary of every penny I spent.”
Jones was stunned at the dry cleaning bill, the restaurant charges, “and the frivolous things I bought and did not need.” Hand-washing soon took the place of dry-cleaning.
“In two weeks, I figured out that I had to eat Ramen Noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner and I had to cut up my credit cards.” Three months later she was out of debt, but still needed months of saving her lunch money to afford a move to a better apartment.
She then rewarded herself and created a credit history at the same time “by buying a set of silver that required, of course, monthly payments.”
When she remarried some years later, she and her husband were both making bigger salaries and were both post-graduate-degreed professionals, “who could just as easily slip back into bad habits and live beyond our means,” Jones says.
“We lived with the ‘cookie jar’ for a long time and gave ourselves a monthly allowance. That was what we used for dinners out and daily things we thought we needed. When the cash was gone, that was it.”
Neither one of them has ever bounced a check.
Jones recommends:
UPDATED: 4-21-2003
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