We believed the lie that we could bootstrap our way out

Heather Bursch on the joy she lost striving to be debt free

My husband and I opened our wedding cards on the way to the airport. It hadn’t been part of the plan, but neither had the honeymoon destination. His parents had promised to “help” us with a trip — if we went to a place they had been, rather than the trip we were hoping for.

It seemed oddly specific, but we were young and wanted to be wise with money, so we bought our flights to Florida, and his parents made the rest of our reservations. But when they gave us a $100 check on the way out of our reception, we had a sinking feeling that the “gift of a trip” was not coming.

Our first argument as a married couple arose upon our arrival in Fort Myers, when we realized that no one had paid for the car rental or the hotel his parents had booked for the week. Luckily, we had a credit card and some wedding cash.

This is where our story of marriage debt began.

Coming home with close to $2,000 credit card debt, after this cold December trip to Marco Island in a dingy, over-priced hotel was the definition of anticlimactic.

I went back to finish my first year of teaching in the new year, and my husband finished his last semester in college while working evenings as a manager at a formalwear store. I'd already started paying off my student loan debt, and before our first anniversary, we'd also be paying his.

We were young and discouraged, but mostly we felt shame for the debt and embarrassed that we had trusted the “gift of a trip” from parents who didn’t have our best interests in mind.

If we just work harder…

A month into marriage, everything that could go wrong did.

My husband’s car was stolen from in front of the basement apartment we were renting. A week later, it turned up with more damage than our insurance would cover. We used our credit card to retrieve it from the impound lot and another charge to make it drivable.

By the time summer arrived, my hand-me-down car’s transmission had given out, but my husband had graduated and could take on more work. We used a loan to buy a new car together, giving us some breathing room from repairs.

We also moved to a safer neighborhood that cost twice the rent (but we got an oven this time and extra security). I started a second job at the mall across the street, and we thought we’d **hustle our way out of this debt hole once and for all.

A year later, my husband’s parents' marriage ended. Because he’s the oldest and I’m an empath and over-responsible for everything, we took it upon ourselves to support his mother and brothers, both emotionally and financially.

One of the kid brothers needed college support and supplies, so we took him shopping and set him up. My husband took his only vacation time, flew out to move his mom and brothers to our state, and helped them settle into an apartment.

Holidays and birthdays? We bought everyone extra gifts to fill in the gaps so everyone felt cared for.

All the while, our finances and our bodies took a hit.

By some stroke of luck, we found therapy. It began a process that was life-saving for us both, but it incurred new financial costs that we didn’t have lying around. We did most of this necessary mental health work in secret, because it felt like we were narking on our family. It would be years before we ever admitted how much money we spent on therapy and the sacrifices it’s taken to make it happen.

I thought: Okay, we’ll do this emotional and physical work, pay our bills, and then we’ll be debt-free. Because that is how good choices work and are rewarded, right?

Well, no, it’s never shiny and clean like that.

I wish I could tell our younger selves that being parents to a parent and siblings, working through trauma and trying to move past survival mode while breaking cycles is complex and expensive lifelong work.

And I certainly want to tell them they weren’t doing it wrong, when year after year, the debt story just wouldn’t go away.

The budget will save us

Around this time, I bought and read my first personal finance book, Jason Anthony and Karl Cluck’s Debt-Free by 30: Practical Advice for the Young, Broke, and Upwardly Mobile. I scoured it for some way to turn my paycheck-to-paycheck reality around.

The answer? Side gigs and living on a budget.

After budgeting, I convinced my husband to stick to one car, even though we worked in opposite directions. We’d spend hours getting each other to and from work or trying to take the bus halfway. We’d take on side jobs in addition to our full-time work just to pay off our debt.

Although I never took a Dave Ramsey course or read one of his books, I was certainly familiar with him through friends and fans.

One of my dearest friends, fully immersed in the envelope budgeting system, showed me how she was creating spreadsheets and restricting her way out of debt. I was so grateful for a tool that I went home with Ramsey energy by proxy. If we were in debt, it was my problem, and I actually reminded myself of this every day as I checked my bank account religiously.

Spoiler: I would, in the years to come, repeatedly use and retry the envelope system, only to end up with more debt than we started with, every single time.

While my inner voice had a few questions about the absolutes in all the financial advice I found and tried, I was conditioned to see that voice as lazy and defensive. It was easier to latch onto the idea that true humility would be to deny ourselves now for a reward (of riches?) later.

There was something comforting about believing we had all the power within us and could lock this debt shit down, like a diet, and beat ourselves into submission. I was so sick of the shame that I latched onto personal responsibility as the path out. It was familiar and easy to grasp.

I told myself that freedom would come if I just tried harder, and if I managed our money like my life depended on it.

If I sacrifice more, we’ll win

Four years into marriage, I was pregnant with our first child. Without paid maternity leave, I used four years of accrued sick leave and returned to teaching after six short weeks. I pumped milk during my only break without students and paid half my salary that year to various child care solutions.

Three years later, I was pregnant with my second child. By now, I couldn’t make the costs of childcare, cars and debt payments work on our salaries. Exhausted, I took my first one-year leave to save my sanity and our finances. I told myself, Maybe if I just stand still, the debt will stop snowballing.

My husband kept his second job, and we stayed with one car to make it all work. If I needed the car, I would drive him to work for two hours or more a day with our young kids in tow. It seemed worth it to help us achieve our ultimate goal: a debt-free future.

After five years on leave, I had to make a choice: return to teaching or resign my tenured position. My husband had a new job and what seemed like a chance for financial freedom, and with this, I made the difficult decision to resign from the school district.

I also quietly withdrew my small retirement fund and dove into homeschooling my oldest, who was struggling with learning differences (and an undiagnosed neurodevelopmental disorder), while also starting a personal chef business.

A month later, my husband was let go from his job.

The next few years felt confusing and scary for all of us. We were back in survival mode, coupled with the same messages of working harder and shaming our debt. We believed we were here because we had done something terribly wrong.

Debt and financial struggle always felt like our fault, and it permeated our decisions and self worth. Even enjoying something as simple as dinner out, new clothes, or a minor home upgrade came with guilt and second-guessing. It felt like the way to fix it was for me to stay steady at home and support my husband’s job search until his career took off.

It took me years to understand the sacrifice I’d made.

This path, of course, worked for my husband’s career. And it worked for our finances. With me at home managing the mental load and tasks for the house and family, my husband could travel, grow, and be more available for opportunities. But it didn’t work the same for my career. And I’m not here to say it was best for my kids either, as much as I loved parts of what it gave me and them.

We did the best we could, and yet I still know I might do things differently today because I can see how debt shame, not clarify, was running the show.

The truth about what actually changed

In the years that followed, things began to shift. We could save money intentionally. We could use debt more freely. We made improvements to our home and started investing (even though I’m still unsure how I feel about this one!).

However, all of this took steady years of my husband earning significantly more money. It didn’t happen because we saved, restricted or worked hard.

Even now, as we earn more and live with more stability, the shame of carrying debt isn’t gone. So much of our money still goes toward putting out fires or paying for our kids' college education. And debt still threatens to complicate joy, sometimes. Vacations, big purchases, even small extras, are easy to second-guess. But I’m learning to let the judgment go, a little more each time, and trust myself.

Living differently, even with debt

I have so much compassion for those who have come before me, and for our young selves driving away from our wedding in that old Toyota that someone would steal a month later.

I see how hard my husband and I have worked, and I don’t mean in our jobs, but in growing up together while raising kids without the benefits of generational wealth, paid parental leave or family support.

The access we now have shows up in small things, like paying for camps upfront, taking advantage of early-bird prices, or stocking up on toiletries and food when they’re on sale. It also shows up in bigger things, like how we weather job changes, because we have found work that pays more, and we have cushions in place, such as less consequential debt and comfort funds.

No matter how hard we tried, debt felt impossible to outrun, given our starting point. This is not a lazy excuse, as budget culture would have us believe. Context matters.

No budget software, no amount of restriction, no awareness was ever effective or sustainable, and it still shocks me, because we tried so hard. But it did not work.

The privilege and option of earning more money certainly gave us more breathing room, but so did learning and trusting that we deserve to use the resources we have in the best way we see fit today, not just someday.

I’m learning to live with debt without shame going forward. I want to keep listening to my intuition and questioning systems to inform all my decisions. This kind of financial freedom and education (not budgeting and restriction) is what I’m hoping to give my kids and those I’m fortunate enough to support emotionally and financially in the future.

For too long, striving for a debt-free future stole my time, clarity, creativity and joy.

And thankfully, I don’t have a yes to that anymore.

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Get You Don’t Need a Budget to heal your relationship with debt and spending.