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" I never used to pay attention to foreclosure notices. They were just inscrutable boxes of black-and-white text I had to flip past to get to a more interesting section of the newspaper. These days, I slow down when I see them, as I might walk past headstones in a graveyard. I see names and dates buried in the legalese: a street, an address. A home. Often the names are followed by the words husband and wife.  I wonder how they&amp;#039;re doing, if they&amp;#039;ll make it.  A year and a half ago, my husband and I were the ones facing foreclosure, hanging off a cliff by our well-gnawed fingernails. I know the exhaustion and terror of staring into that abyss. It&amp;#039;s hard on the soul, and it&amp;#039;s hell on a marriage. We came back from the brink, but we still find ourselves playing chicken with it from time to time, when a job is slow to pay or an unexpected expense depletes our modest emergency savings.  It&amp;#039;s tempting to assume that people who fall on hard times have brought it upon themselves, through recklessness or greed. But every financial disaster is disastrous in its own way \u2014 easy enough to see where the downward spiral ends, harder to sort out where it began.  In 2004, my husband, Patrick, left a 20-year career in corporate advertising to open his own design studio. Other people on the verge of such a leap might have gotten all their ducks in a row first: formulated a business plan, banked a year&amp;#039;s worth of living expenses.  We&amp;#039;ve never been other people. There was no plan. Our ducks tend to be free-range. We&amp;#039;d chased after them a few times \u2014 like running off to Mexico early in our courtship to live until our money ran out, then coming back to the States to start over with nothing but our clothes and an antique Mercury Comet, powder blue and chrome. &amp;quot;Fortune favors the bold&amp;quot; was our motto.  When we married, we vowed to keep following our bliss. But after our kids came, Patrick&amp;#039;s wistful notion of working for himself kept getting deferred. &amp;quot;When the children are all in school,&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;d tell him. Or, &amp;quot;When we&amp;#039;ve saved enough money.&amp;quot; And then, &amp;quot;When we&amp;#039;re out of debt.&amp;quot; When it feels safe to abandon a predictable paycheck, matching contributions to a 401(k), group health insurance, and paid vacation, that&amp;#039;s when. That day never came. Patrick kept the lid on his growing unhappiness until it began to leak out messily.  He and his job broke up.  At the time, my part-time income as an administrative assistant barely covered groceries. It was just something on the side, a foothold in the grown-up world. For now, I was content with the job that mattered most to me: being home with our three small children. I thought it was the thing that mattered most to Patrick also \u2014 a noble reason to put up with an unsatisfactory situation for a few more years, at least. I was angry, disappointed, and frightened when he came to the end of his rope.  But I could also see how deeply unhappy my husband had become, and how long he&amp;#039;d been trying to hide it. His career as a hired hand in a small market was at a creative dead end. Freelancing from our home would give him the variety and autonomy he was longing for, and allow him to spend more time with our kids. We had a little bit of savings, and Patrick had 20 years&amp;#039; worth of contacts in the business. I was willing to give it a chance. As the saying goes, when the students are ready, the teacher will appear. Ours was a financial adviser named Linda Bessette. A friend recommended her, assuring us that even one session would be an hour and $75 well spent. Linda listened to our hopes and fears, reviewed our numbers, looked us straight in the eye, and told us in her no-bull New England accent, &amp;quot;You can do this.&amp;quot;  Although Patrick had talked over the years about striking out on his own, I had frankly underestimated the motivating power of independence. The husband I had feared was too laid-back to chase clients methodically and determinedly sought work, and work came. But his business tends to be one of feast or famine, subject to seasonal cycles, economic conditions, and chance. Months sometimes pass between checks; sometimes, between jobs. &amp;quot;Why didn&amp;#039;t we go to med school?&amp;quot; I said to Patrick when my son asked why he couldn&amp;#039;t buy his lunch instead of packing it every day. &amp;quot;What were we thinking?&amp;quot;  Linda gave us much-needed perspective for the long haul. &amp;quot;Look,&amp;quot; she&amp;#039;d say, when our confidence wavered, &amp;quot;most start-ups don&amp;#039;t show any profit at all in the first few years. You guys are making your living from this right out of the gate.&amp;quot;  Well, barely. But it helped to hear it. Besides her sheer faith in our abilities, and helping us budget, Linda&amp;#039;s most valuable contribution during our start-up year was to remind us that we had choices. &amp;quot;You could rent out a room in your house,&amp;quot; she pointed out. &amp;quot;You could sell it. You can enroll the kids in public school instead of paying private tuition.&amp;quot;  She was right. We did have choices. But we were trying not to exercise the tough ones. I, especially, was still clinging to the infrastructure of salaried life. I never wanted to be the poster girl for frugal living. I enjoy material comforts as much as the next person. I&amp;#039;d been looking at sharing a car and hand-me-downs as short-term pain for long-term gain.  It wasn&amp;#039;t terribly traumatic to pack lunches and clip coupons. But the idea of making drastic changes to our living space or the children&amp;#039;s education was. The school is special, we explained. Our home is sacred.  Still, Linda challenged us to rethink all our assumptions. &amp;quot;What are you waiting for?&amp;quot; she asked, when she learned I had put writing on the vocational back burner. I found I didn&amp;#039;t have a good answer for that, since it was something I could do from home. I had the uncomfortable awareness that I had been using my kids as a shield between my dream and me.  I kept my paying job, but I also began writing again. My first fee \u2014 $100 for a guest commentary in a newspaper \u2014 felt like a cool million. At the end of our first year in business, we got a pleasant surprise: We weren&amp;#039;t too far behind our income from Patrick&amp;#039;s corporate job the year before. Cost-cutting measures filled in some of the gap. We closed the rest with savings withdrawals and credit cards. Meantime, Patrick and I were reveling in the novelty of being at home together every day.  The second year proved to be a different story. Nearly every month, there was a point at which we thought the last job had gone out the door. No one would ever give us another dime. And then suddenly Patrick would be deluged and working 72-hour stretches. Remind me how this is less stressful than agency work, I was tempted to ask at those times. Remind me about all the togetherness, I wanted to say, when he was working morning to night and I was feeling nostalgic for Monday to Friday, 8 to 5.  We survived those months one last-minute reprieve after another. Disaster would loom, and a check would appear at the 59th minute of the 11th hour. I was frustrated, fatigued, and flat-out furious at the zero-sum-ness of it all. Always just enough. Always just in time. I was sick of just. We were living retroactively, unable to get enough traction to get caught up, much less ahead. The question of affording school tuition for the next year became moot. I wrote the headmistress, informing her we&amp;#039;d have to withdraw. She steered us to scholarship funds that would fully supplement the financial aid we already received.  On registration day, my third grader saw the brochure for after-school chess classes and asked me if he could sign up. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t have money for that today,&amp;quot; I said, as matter-of-factly as I could muster. A smartly dressed mother at the sign-up table turned to look at me.  A moment later, another parent walked up beside me, the mother of the kid whose used social studies book I had bought for my son. In what would have been a comedy of errors if it hadn&amp;#039;t been so embarrassing, the check I had written for it had bounced, and then the check I had written to cover that had bounced. The book wound up costing me an arm and a leg after all the fees had been paid. It&amp;#039;s expensive to be poor. Not one of these events in isolation would have fazed me. I&amp;#039;m okay with telling my kids when we can&amp;#039;t afford something. As my friend who works in a posh boutique assures me, even wealthy people bounce checks sometimes. But all together, it was just too much. I had cried more in the past few months than in all the 10 years we&amp;#039;d been married. I worried we were failing our kids.  We&amp;#039;d been meeting with Linda less regularly, since we could no longer afford to pay cash, and I hated to take advantage of her willingness to run us a tab. When I put in an SOS call, she insisted we come in that day. Ironically, in spite of our day-to-day crises, the big picture was looking good. Patrick&amp;#039;s client base was growing; my writing was getting picked up. To quit now would be to throw away all that promise. &amp;quot;Now is not the time to take your eyes off the ball,&amp;quot; Linda reminded us. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s go over all of your choices.&amp;quot;  The &amp;quot;choices&amp;quot; now were declaring bankruptcy or selling the house. Linda matter-of-factly outlined the pros and cons of each. Everything was on the table now. My husband and I tiptoed around it gingerly, the way we walked around each other.  Only from the safety of Linda&amp;#039;s office could Patrick say aloud what he thought we should do. He had asked me to come out on this limb with him, and he knew there were days I was close to pushing him off, when I wished he would just grow up, get a real job. Rescue me. &amp;quot;I think maybe the struggle to hang on to the house has become more difficult than it would be to let it go,&amp;quot; Patrick said quietly.  Easy for you to say, I felt like shouting. This was all your stupid idea anyway. But I knew Linda would never let me get away with it. Choices, she&amp;#039;d say. Decisions. It was time for us to make one. Patrick was open to either selling the house or rebooting our debt load by filing for bankruptcy. Whatever it would take to turn us around, forward facing. I wanted to explore refinancing our house first. Our credit was shot, but we had built quite a bit of equity. All of us agreed it was worth a try. It&amp;#039;s nice to think, before life really tests you, that you&amp;#039;ll be the couple who exemplify unity and grace under pressure. I would like to tell you we are that couple. But the truth is, the navigation of life&amp;#039;s more harrowing storms has not always been accomplished using our indoor voices.  On a good day, I was proud of my husband for striking out on his own, and proud of myself for being able to take the leap of faith with him.  On a good day, one of us could always find a way to make the other smile. &amp;quot;Got to keep you in the lifestyle to which you&amp;#039;ve lowered your expectations,&amp;quot; he&amp;#039;d say with a wink and a grin, when I&amp;#039;d chide him about working long hours. On a good day, I knew that our marriage did not depend on the score on our credit report.  The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, 2007, was not a good day. The fall quarter had been unusually slow. Patrick made $250 the entire month of October. A client who owed him thousands of dollars was MIA. Our attempt to refinance our home had hit a brick wall.  We were spiraling down. The only avenue left was to try and sell quickly, ahead of foreclosure. In the meantime, there was the immediate future and the holiday season to get through. I knew we would have to swallow our pride and reach out. That morning, I drove past a man on the freeway holding a cardboard sign. COULD USE A LITTLE HELP, it said. I had $10 in my purse, and I didn&amp;#039;t know where the next $10 was coming from. I was on the opposite side of the road. It would make a good story to say I turned around and gave him half of what I had, but I didn&amp;#039;t. I borrowed his sign and hung it on my heart instead.  I e-mailed my mom and a family friend through tears. We could use a little help. I was exhausted, embarrassed, and afraid. &amp;quot;If we lose our home,&amp;quot; I told Patrick after sending the message, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know if I can forgive you.&amp;quot;  Patrick, already haunted by the thought of failing to provide for his family, bent his head and walked outside to sit on the porch and brood until our kids got home. All night, my bitter words hung in the air. I thought it would make me feel better if I could point my finger at someone and say, &amp;quot;You did this, now you fix it.&amp;quot; It didn&amp;#039;t. I had the sick feeling I had cashed in something precious for something very cheap.  The next day, the eve of Thanksgiving, I got up early and considered our blessings. We had family and friends who would not let us go homeless or hungry. We had three healthy and happy sons whom we hoped we were buffering from the worst of our anxiety. We&amp;#039;d had promising signs that our respective careers would flourish if we could just pull away from the whirlpool our reverse cash flow had created.  And we had each other. Once, that had been all I ever wanted. &amp;quot;Meet me a little bit of the way,&amp;quot; Patrick said to me years ago, when he had already moved to Mexico. We&amp;#039;d met on the Internet and had been carrying on an epic, coast-to-coast courtship. I stood frozen in fear and indecision at the other end of the phone line, the opposite corner of the continent. &amp;quot;Just a little bit,&amp;quot; he repeated. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll come all the rest of the way to meet you.&amp;quot; I packed a bag, got on a bus, and met him a few hundred miles from where I put down the phone. He came the other few thousand.  The best part of my life was everything that happened after.  Surely, after 10 years of marriage, I could find it in me to meet him more than just a little bit of the way.  In the morning, Patrick came downstairs with the same stricken look I&amp;#039;d put on his face the day before. I took his hand in mine; felt the innumerable, tiny scratches etched into his wedding band. If I counted them up, like the rings of a tree, would they tell the years? &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m so sorry,&amp;quot; I said to him. &amp;quot;We can let go of this house. But not each other.&amp;quot;  Soon after the Christmas decorations came down, the FOR SALE sign went up. We were lucky. Not only did the house sell within days at the asking price, we fell in love with a smaller house in a wonderful, less expensive neighborhood. With a substantial down payment, we were able to secure a new mortgage. We set aside savings for the short and long term. Following Linda&amp;#039;s advice, we also set up a credit card repayment plan with a reputable debt management agency.  An agency counselor sat down with me to add up our debt. I cringed at the total, an amount that suggested fancy vacations and much nicer furniture than we had. Most of it had been incurred at the grocery store and gas station \u2014 all those months when ends didn&amp;#039;t quite meet. The agency renegotiated our interest rates and consolidated our monthly payments.  I swear, the minute we let go of everything we&amp;#039;d been fighting so hard to keep, whatever had been stuck came unstuck, and opportunity came pouring in. Jobs that had been stalled for months resumed. Checks arrived for invoices that had been all but written off. You could almost hear the &amp;quot;pop.&amp;quot;  I can&amp;#039;t tell anyone a thing about managing money. But I can tell you something about staying married when it feels like the ground beneath your feet is opening. We hoisted ourselves back up, but from time to time we get a mini refresher course. Here are some lessons we learned about recession-proofing a marriage. Next: How to recession-proof your marriage Stay on the same team When my children split into opposing forces in imaginative play, I put everyone back on the same team, and tell them to go brandish the sticks at an invisible enemy instead of one another, before someone gets walloped. Same for us. Expressing disagreement, distress, and anger is part of problem solving. But there&amp;#039;s healthy confrontation, and then there&amp;#039;s kicking someone when he or she is down. Use your fingers for grabbing hands and holding on, not pointing. You&amp;#039;re in this together.  Withdraw your identity from your bank account Deep in the trough, each of us secretly wished the other would grow up, get a real job. Then we could keep our house and fix it up, buy a second vehicle, go on vacations like our children&amp;#039;s classmates did. We measure a lot in this society by the wealth a person appears to have. When it feels like the rest of the world is looking down, be the one who keeps your mate&amp;#039;s chin up. Affirm other kinds of success: friendship, parenting, a talent. Everyone needs to hear the words I believe in you, and never more so than in times of self-doubt.  Maintain a one-man-down policy with each other Patrick and I share an unspoken understanding that only one of us can be &amp;quot;down&amp;quot; at any given time. If one is feeling depressed or anxious, the other has to stay up on his or her end of the seesaw. We have a script that goes something like this: First person: Tell me everything&amp;#039;s going to be okay. Second person: Everything is absolutely going to be okay. First person: I don&amp;#039;t believe you. Second person: I promise you, everything&amp;#039;s going to be okay. First person: Okay. It&amp;#039;s a good strategy for short-term dips, like a bad day, as long as there is equilibrium over time. The roles, after all, are interchangeable. Reach out Letting friends and family in on what was going on with us was hard, but it opened the door to a flood of support, prayers, and, yes, some financial assistance. One friend scolded us for not telling her sooner what dire straits we were in. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t be afraid to ask for help, Kyran,&amp;quot; she told me. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s part of life.&amp;quot; I was humbled to be on the receiving end of the same words I preach to my children, hoping to spare them the isolation of pride and perfectionism. Admitting we were vulnerable allowed others to let down their own facade of &amp;quot;fine, thank you.&amp;quot; People I&amp;#039;d always thought of as &amp;quot;haves&amp;quot; confided &amp;quot;have not&amp;quot; tales of debt, pink slips, bad investments. We realized we were hardly the first family to go through a rough patch. Round up the sacred cows Where change is required, the options are often defined by what people won&amp;#039;t give up. Bankruptcy was at odds with my definition of responsibility, and renting out a spare room to a boarder violated my husband&amp;#039;s sense of privacy. The space we allowed ourselves in which to imagine new solutions became a very small square bounded by all our lines drawn in the sand. Eventually, we had to redraw the box. Each of us was being asked to place something we valued very highly in it, and we had to learn to give the other breathing room to reconsider it without feeling forced. Every high-stakes discussion became an exercise in compromise, respect, and trust. We gained back much more than we gave up.  Take time out from worry As with our checking account, we weren&amp;#039;t always able to put into our relationship what we needed to take out. It&amp;#039;s hard to afford romance and intimacy when you are consumed by worry. With three kids, long walks and leisurely conversations were rare luxuries. Dates might as well have been diamonds. Still, we tried. I declared brief holidays from worry, when we did our best to reconnect as a couple, watching a TV show together at the end of the day, or simply taking time out for a hug or shoulder rub. We found other ways to draw off worry: with a prayer or mantra, physical activity, or a household chore. When anything overwhelms us now, we ask, What is the next right thing? Nine times out of 10 it&amp;#039;s something as simple as unloading the dishwasher or making some lunch.  Practice gratitude There was a point that year where if I heard another variation on &amp;quot;That which does not kill us makes us stronger,&amp;quot; I was going to scream. Sometimes, that which does not kill us can beat us up and leave us in a ditch. So I hesitate on this last point because I know there is someone reading this who is in that ditch today, who&amp;#039;d like to tell me what to do with my gratitude.  But there&amp;#039;s no way around it. There is nothing like fear for distorting perspective, and nothing like gratitude for restoring it. I&amp;#039;m not talking about the false gratitude that denies that you or anyone else is suffering. Nor the shadowy kind that depends on the truism that somebody, somewhere, is always worse off than you, nor the timid thankfulness that doesn&amp;#039;t dare ask more from life than basic survival. I mean really appreciating what is in front of you right now, even if you don&amp;#039;t know if you can count on it tomorrow.  &amp;quot;I have everything I need today,&amp;quot; became the mantra that brought us through that hard year. Even when we couldn&amp;#039;t quite believe it, it never failed to be true.  Gratitude still brings us through the rough spots today. In the middle of some anxious weeks last month, I walked into my husband&amp;#039;s office and peered at him over his computer screen. &amp;quot;Hey,&amp;quot; I said.  His eyes looked tired. He&amp;#039;d been working double-time to get us over the hump. I could see his shoulders hunched visibly higher than usual. But he smiled.  &amp;quot;Hey,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;How are you doing?&amp;quot; I knew he meant, &amp;quot;How are we doing?&amp;quot; I had just come from the mailbox. Nothing yet. Our big monthly debt-reduction payment had just come out of our checking account. It was down to the three-figure mark, and our mortgage payment was coming due next week.  I reached over the screen and ran my finger along the worry line in my true love&amp;#039;s forehead, as if I could smooth it over. It was so much deeper now than it was over a decade ago when we traded all those blithe promises. I had no clue then how poor, how sick, how awful we could sometimes be. Nor any idea how rich, how strong, and how good. For that matter, I still didn&amp;#039;t.  Life can get better, it can get worse. It will probably do both. &amp;quot;I have everything I need today,&amp;quot; I told him.  I could see in his sleepy eyes that we both did. And here, many days later, we still do. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/relationships/advice/a16489/marriage-money-problems/>