***If you’re on my email list, you’ve already read this but since this email received such a wonderful response from y’all, I decided to share it for others to benefit from as well.
Debt is hard. It’s hard to live underneath the crushing weight of debt.
Even though I don’t consider medical bills as consumer debt, it’s still debt because it’s money you owe for services that you received. And if you’ve been following my goals update posts, you know that the reason we have yet to meet our emergency fund goal is due to the medical bills from our infant daughter’s hospital stay earlier this year.
This whole thing happened shortly after paying off my student loans and a huge chunk of our mortgage so we were feeling like we were on top of the world...and then it came crashing down when Charlotte was admitted to the hospital for trouble breathing.
Thankfully, she ended up only needing to stay one night and is completely fine now.
However, the medical bills have been astounding! You may remember from this post that at the beginning of the year, my husband’s employer switched from the most amazing health insurance company to an Affordable Care Act Plan which caused our deductibles to skyrocket.
So we’ve been working months to pay off this debt and it’s been a sobering reminder of just how heavy the burden of debt is.
It’s so hard to walk around carrying that burden. It was made even harder by the fact that we got just a little taste of what debt-freedom feels like when we made that last payment on my student loans…only to have to fall back in the hole due to an medical emergency.
Now, you may be asking, “why don’t you just pay it from your emergency fund?”
That’s a valid question and definitely an option but for my husband and I, we see our emergency fund as something to pay for if my husband lost his job or some other completely life-changing event happened.
For us, we don’t want to use it for medical bills because even though it’s taking us a while to pay off that debt, the debt itself isn’t that huge. We may consider taking money from our EF if the bill was in the 5 digits or more.
But we’ll have this bill paid off by the end of August…which is ironic since that’s when we paid off our debt last year….I swear, God must have a sense of humor. 🙂
So, if you’re in this place, a place of heavy burden with debt or finding yourself back in debt after killing off the beast long ago, I want to encourage you. It’s not easy carry this burden, I know, but keep moving forward. Don’t allow the weight of this burden to crush you.
Set your goals, and keep moving towards them, one step at a time. Don’t waste your time beating yourself up over this burden, just keep going.
Yes! We are facing this right now. So many unexpected medical expenses all seem to have happened at once. But we can’t give up, we just have to keep moving forward.
I’m so glad your daughter is safe. The health of our children is worth all the money in the world; but it frustrates me that US health care is in this place. I am so very grateful for socialised medicine where I live. I know of Americans who have had to choose between paying their rent or taking their child to a doctor, and it’s so sad that that is the situation in a very wealthy, first-world country.
There’s surely going to be bumpy roads along the way because life is so unexpected and unpredictable. As long as the course and the plan is intact, there’s no doubt that one can reach his or her goals. I’m glad that you guys will be debt free by the end of this month, so close to the goal! 🙂