After the birth of my daughter we were on the path to success. I worked for a local government and my wife started an in home daycare.

We purchased a house and were renovating the basement to allow for a larger space for my wife. She currently used the upstairs of our normal residence and was subject to licensing requirements that allowed for only ten kids.

We lived in a beautiful town that had an unobstructed view of the mountains. Life was perfect, and then we wanted to have another child.

That was when things started to go wrong. Without going into much detail we lost the pregnancy and had to have a medical procedure that nearly killed my wife. In less than three months from finding out we were pregnant again I was sitting in a hotel room in Moab, Utah waiting to find out how bad my wife was.

My daughter was with the nurse’s daughter while I tried to attend the conference that I was originally traveling for. When the hospital finally called and told me my wife was stable but sleeping I was relieved. I did not realize how close to death she had come.

A few weeks later the depression set in. I came home from work one day and could not find my wife, after searching the house I found her crying on the floor of the walk in closet. Things would get much worse from there and led to my wife being hospitalized.

With the daycare her only source of income and being faced with closing it down until she was stable again, we started looking at what we could do to make ends meet.

This was also the first time having to deal with a major mental illness and I am ashamed to say that I did not make the best decisions on how to process it. The first was to trade the minivan in for a truck. I hated the minivan and I probably reacted with anger when I should have been rational but we lost quite a bit of money and now had a larger truck payment.

The second was to abandon our home in hopes to find a new job closer to my family. My thought was if I could get help from the family it would be easier to deal with the mental illness and taking care of my now 18 month old daughter.

I was essentially a single father. I was trying to juggle being a single parent and care-taker for my wife and that caused me to be irrational. Within six months I would move my family to South Carolina, cash in my 401k, break even on a house that was worth far more than I was offered, and continue to hemorrhage money.

This was the beginning of the dark times both mentally and financially. We made a series of major financial mistakes in the next few years and while these stories may be hard to fathom I tell them in hopes that people facing similar situations can realize their mistakes before they make them.

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