When Annette and I were first married, we did not have much money, and we did not have much income. What we did have was a carefully planned budget and a shared determination to live within it.
After living in the Call Cabin in Turnerville for the first month of our marriage, we moved to an apartment at 736 E 1500 S in Orem, Utah. We lived there from June 1990 to August 1992, before moving into the basement apartment of Michel and Mary’s house on Windsor Drive in Provo. During those first two years, Annette worked as a student assistant in the MBA program office. I worked one summer driving a delivery truck for BYU Stores and then took a job as a Traffic Officer writing parking tickets.
Our biggest recurring monthly expenses were predictable and unforgiving. The car payment on the Ford Probe was $275 a month. Rent was $265. Utilities averaged about $50. Our student paychecks covered those expenses, along with our tithing, but there was very little left over.
After careful planning and reviewing our variable monthly expenses, we set a budget that included $50 a month for gas. We bought bus passes to keep that number down. We also set aside $40 a week for groceries.
That grocery budget was the tightest part of our plan.
At the time, there was a grocery store called Food 4 Less near 2400 North University Parkway in Provo. It was a bare-bones store with warehouse shelving and bag-your-own groceries, which was still a novelty back then.
Each week, Annette and I planned our shopping list carefully. Then we took a calculator with us to the store. This was before calculators lived in our pockets, because cell phones as we now know them did not exist back then. As we walked through the aisles, we added the price of each item we put into the cart to a running total on the calculator. Money really was that tight, and we were that deliberate.
As the total crept toward forty dollars, we calculated the sales tax and added it in to make sure we did not cross the line. There was no wiggle room. Forty dollars meant forty dollars.
Many weeks, we hit the limit and still had items left on the list. When that happened, we stopped and reconsidered everything in the cart against everything we had not yet picked up. We asked which mattered more for the coming week. Those decisions were not abstract. They determined what we would eat.
Most of the time, we were able to agree quickly. Occasionally, we could not. When that happened, the question was not which item we wanted more, but whether we would exceed the budget we had set. Sometimes we did. Most of the time, we did not.
We did not starve. But we did not live like a king and queen either! Looking back, those weekly decisions taught me that a strong marriage is built less on what you can afford and more on how well you choose together when you cannot have everything.
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