How we afford being Married in College

Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. We are Matt and Abby and today we're making a video on how we manage our finances in marriage. We're both in college and we got a lot of questions last time in our last video, so we wanted to answer those in this video and here we go. We've noticed and we've talked to a lot of couples that are engaged or thinking about engaged or really not wanting to get engaged for this reason and most of them all say that they can't afford it. Yep. So we just want to talk about that because most likely there's gonna be ways that you could make the money happen. I will say this, when we started college, we decided to go to the same school together because we knew we wanted to get married and with that decision, I immediately started looking for a job, found a job, worked very hard to be employed and right away, Abby also started working too pretty soon after. I worked my first semester too. Yeah, and so we were working right away as freshmen in college and some people just don't want to do that and that's fine, but for us, we're like, no, we want to get married and so we're going to be financially stable. We have to have money coming in and so we did that and so that was a step of maturity we had to take and if you're someone who wants to get married, you have to be willing to take on disciplines and maturity like that to make it happen. You just have to decide what's most important to you. But I would say, I mean, with that step of maturity, I grew so much and I'm so thankful for that, but right along with that is people have this misconception that when you get married, it's going to cost you all this money. That was something that we discovered quickly after we got married wasn't true. We've actually been saving money by being married. One of the ways we noticed we're saving money is on rent. We found a cheap place to live. You can go online and like look up where the more affordable places to live are and we did that and found a place that was reasonable. We're saving money on food because our budget is combined now to where we are more efficient in the money that we spend and we've also had the Pell Grant work out for us. So this isn't something that we were expecting to happen. We didn't know if it would happen. We did receive a grant by getting married and we would actually still be saving money if it wasn't for this grant, but that was just an extra blessing getting that grant and realizing, hey, like this is working out. When you change your filing status from dependent, when you're dependent on your parents to independent, that's what results in that grant and I know that we're not the only couple that has gotten married in college that has received this grant. It's not uncommon. Here's another funny thing about getting married. You don't even think about this, but when you have a wedding, people wanna bless you. People wanna just congratulate you and give you money, give you things off your registry. Help you get started. Yeah, help you get started. So that was a huge blessing. Also, car insurance, my rates went down because now that I'm married, they just obviously recognize that I'm taking on maturity and responsibility. The other thing though, the caveat here is while yes, getting married, we've taken on expenses like our phone bill and other things like that. While that has happened, at the very least, I would say it would even out. I mean, I don't know, you watching this video, I don't know what your financial situation is, so just be aware that you can save money if you get married and we're saving money by being married. So you need to work a job and in addition to working a job, don't go out and spend all your money on stuff you don't need. We have been very, very much so mindful of our spending and so we save a lot of money. We do not spend more than what we take in. I understand some people are in tough financial situations in different areas of their life, but when those things come up, which they are going to come up, you need to have savings and savings are also important just for the simple principle of building wealth. You need to pay yourself first when it comes to finances and so we've been diligent about saving money and not spending more than what we bring in. As a girl, this is just a stereotype, so I don't know if it applies to every girl, but it's more difficult for me to reassess my needs than it is for Matt, so that has been a sacrifice, I guess you could say. You know, maybe I don't need to go shopping all the time or if I go shopping, maybe I can just be the awkward person that's kind of just window shopping and not really purchasing anything or maybe I don't need to get a fancy coffee every time. Maybe I can have somebody over and we can make coffee. It sounds silly, but they really do add up and Matt has shown me that like with the budgeting tools we use, like you can see that they really do add up. You know, little conveniences that we have kind of foregone by cooking at home and making things on our own. We barely eat out. Those conveniences, those are really nice, but like we said, it's reevaluating and keeping in mind what you really want in exchange for these things that you could give or take. While Abby may not be going to stores and buying clothes that she wants and doing all these things and spending $7 all the time on a coffee drink, she's giving that luxury up. Yes, that's true, but at the same time, we have the luxury of financial freedom. We're not worried about where our money for rent is gonna come from. We're not worried about paying our bills, because we've been diligent in our saving and so that brings an overwhelming amount of peace and security and I also wanna encourage you, pick up a book by Dave Ramsey. There's good information out there about not going into debt. We have not gone into debt for school and that's been a huge blessing, so pick up one of his books. I actually read his books right when we were thinking about getting married and I wanted to learn how to manage our finances. I will say also, if you are diligent with your finances, sometimes your expenses might be so high that things you can't help, bills, medical bills, random something happens to your car. Those things you can avoid, but the other thing though is if you have savings and you realize that there is enough in your bank account that you can be a blessing to other people or to donate, that is amazing and that feels, honestly, so much better than a new pair of shoes. It takes maturity and it's something I'm still learning and working on, but it's really just exchanging small things for a bigger picture. Just this past month, we had needed repairs for my vehicle that came up. $500, just boom, that hurts, but because we're financially independent, that was a blessing to be able to pay that ourselves and not have to take on debt to pay something like that. Shop at places like thrift stores if you need to buy clothes. When you're buying groceries, there's places you can go that will be cheaper. Like for instance, Walmart tends to be pretty cheap. We found that Aldi was even more affordable than Walmart and also the Dollar Store. You go to like a Dollar Tree, they have good deals. These are Midwest places. These are Midwest places, but you can find some really good deals, so many different things you just won't even think of. You can find those at the Dollar Store and all the little things add up. They really do and just be mindful of that. A lot of people ask how we can spend so little on groceries. There's a way to eat healthy and eat cheap. I will say that. Like whatever we can get, I get at the cheapest store that we have and then I just supplement with things at like a more expensive grocery store that we couldn't get. I know that finances can be like tough for some people to talk about with their partner and that they can potentially lead to some arguments, but I would encourage like open discussion about money. Sometimes I'm guilty of being like nervous or uncomfortable to talk about money, but it's definitely not something that you should be shy about because it is important and ultimately it's just gonna add to more freedom for you. Exactly. So have those tough discussions and be open about it and open about what's important to you and what you can give up and just really reevaluate that. And to add on to that too, by not addressing it, by not looking into your finances, it's not gonna make it go away. Yeah, that's true. It's still gonna be there. You still gotta deal with it. But now the thing that you're wondering about too is you've probably seen on our Instagram or whatever that we do travel and we do go on fun dates and we do stuff like that. So how do we afford travel? How do we afford date nights? And the thing is when it comes to date nights, there are so many fun dates you can do that don't cost very much money. So we go on walks, we go to parks, we go to national parks, we go to places that are cheap or free. And there's so many things like that you can do. We love our date nights at home. We'll cook dinner together or Abby will make it and we'll just watch a movie and hang out. And when it comes to vacationing and travel, we find cheap ways to do that because we use apps like Skip Lagged and we use Airbnb to find deals. This is not an ad for those at all. We just have found those super helpful. When we were in Hawaii on a vacation, we actually ate basically all of our food from the grocery store and that saved us so much money. So if you're wanting to travel on a budget, eat at the grocery store. Maybe if you're not gonna fly, drive there, you can save a lot by driving typically. And that's just been awesome to get to go do fun trips on a budget. We are very mindful of watching our spending. We track our spending and budget out our money in an app called Mint, M-I-N-T, Mint. And that's a nice way just to aggregate like our bank account and our credit cards and all of our information just to see where's money coming in, where's money coming out. It's free, so if you guys wanna use that free app, I would highly recommend it. That's what I do for our finances. For us, with our credit cards, we pay it off right away. We treat it like a debit card. We never spend money that we don't have in the bank. And immediately upon making purchases, we pay off that credit card right away. We never have paid interest and these credit cards have interest rates upwards of 20%. It's ridiculous. And that's just gonna be something that really puts a hole in your pocket and drains it by paying interest upon interest. I mean, it's just, it's really sad when you can get into that cycle. What I wanna finish with though is we have been extremely, extremely blessed financially and that's not because of anything we did ourselves. While yes, we've both worked very hard in college, we've been diligent students and we've been diligent in working and making money. We both worked, we are full-time students and we both worked part-time. Along with that, not only are we going to a university that is affordable, that we got in-state tuition at, not only did we get scholarships, our parents and grandparents have blessed us. They had money set aside for us for school. And so if we would have gone to a more expensive school, that money wouldn't have gone that far. But because we went to an affordable school, that money's gone a long way and we've been able to afford things like travel and trips. But if we didn't have the money for it, we would not be doing that. And I think I just wanna drive that home because if you do not have the money for something, do not spend money on that. Do not spend money in excess of what you make. And please, please, please, save, save, save. Like make sure that you're saving money. Please, please, please, save, save, save. Please save. You can give yourself a pay raise. Like by saving, you are literally giving yourself a pay raise. If you spend all the money you're bringing in, then you don't have anything left over. So give yourself a pay raise and save. Thank you guys so much. We hope you like this video. Please stay tuned for more content to follow. Bye.