Hi, my name is Dave Johnson. Let me begin the very first post of this blog by saying that I don’t even have enough money in my pocket right now to pay for the premium hosting for this blog. That’s around $3 bucks a month for those of you wondering.

The kicker? I make well over six figures a year.

If that sounds hard to believe, let me double down on the craziness for just a moment.

Three weeks ago we were at a high school lacrosse game. My son plays lacrosse in grade school, and we were asked with a group of parents to turn out with our young players to support our high school team. We love the sport, so we made the commitment and attended with our kids.

At the game, a group of parents had set up a concession stand to sell simple snacks to raise money for the lacrosse club. One of the items they had for sale was pizza by the slice. $2.50 per slice. What a steal!

And yet my wife and I were too concerned about finances to partake. We bought our son a single slice and we waited until we got home to find something else to eat. We couldn’t bring ourselves to spending $5 dollars on a slice of pizza on a six figure income, because we weren’t even convinced we could pay all of our bills that month.

How in the hell does this happen?

I’ll get to that in future posts, but I wanted to establish a baseline of where I’m coming from on this journey, and I want anyone reading to know that they’re not alone if they feel the crippling weight of debt and financial distress. My realization of just how bad things were came around 6 months ago (I’ll get to that in a future post), and there have been times where I have wanted to curl up into a ball and lay there until the banks came and took the roof from over my head.

That’s a difficult post for me to write and allow you to read. It’s demoralizing. It’s embarrassing. It’s shameful. It’s also a wake-up call for me that if I can get into a financial hole like this one, a lot of people like me can too. I’ve never been arrested, I’ve never so much as had a speeding ticket. I am a married father of two who tries really hard to give his family everything they could ever ask for, and in doing so I made some really stupid decisions that got me into this hole. With every credit card I took it was like a bank handing me a new shovel and saying, “Those others look a bit worn down. Try this bad boy on for size!”

So if you’re like me, standing in a pretty deep hole with more shovels than you can hold right now, keep checking back in. I’m going to figure a way out, and I hope you pick up some tips of your own along the way that help you to do the same.

I’m tired of this hole. It’s lead to nothing but callused hands less and less sunlight.

Time to dig out.