full disclosure.

in my last entry, i talked a lot about sam, my fiance. this is because he was essentially the catalyst for my financial epiphany. however, there is still more to say, which might clarify my financial situation a little bit.

sam is not from the united states. i met him while he was here studying on a scholarship. the culture in his home country is vastly different than the one i was raised in, and we don’t speak the same first language, which, in my opinion, makes the success of our relationship thus far that much more awesome. we want to be able to spend at least some years living in his home country, a place where i don’t speak the language (although i am learning). therefore, my job prospects in his country might be limited. this is a huge reason why i am on a mission to knock down my debt.

sam knows that i have debt. he has none. his undergraduate education was free in his country, and his graduate work was paid for by a scholarship from his country’s government. he did have some consumer debt at one point, but was able to pay it off earlier.

sam does know that i have debt to pay off, and he knows some of it is student loans and some of it is on credit cards. however, he does not know how much of each type i have, nor does he know the total amount. i’m simply not comfortable disclosing it. he hasn’t pressed me to give him this information, but i have told him that i will disclose totals to him closer to the time when we will get married. he doesn’t seem worried about it, which i am grateful for. i just want some time to make the number smaller before i have to disclose it.

sam will be returning to his home country in a month or so. his passport and visa are about to expire, and he wants to get a job as soon as possible—one of the stipulations of his government scholarship is that he has to spend a certain amount of time working in his country. so for an amount of time that is yet to be determined, while i am working on my ph.d. and sam is working in his field and navigating the marriage bureaucracy in his country, he and i will be on opposite sides of the earth. neither of us are looking forward to this necessary separation, but we know that it’s the best thing for our future together.

what the separation does mean is that i’ll have free rein to test out and perfect new frugal techniques that i can continue to utilize once we are together again. sam isn’t a spendthrift, per se, but he doesn’t see the need to compromise on things he believes we need. for example, i once tried to make our our own dishwasher detergent out of borax, washing soda, and lemonade mix. the recipe worked well for the first few times we used it. but after a couple of days, for some reason, the homemade detergent turned hard as a rock and refused to be scooped neatly into the dishwasher. we had to use a butter knife to chisel sections of detergent away from the big rock and place them in the dishwasher. i would have done this until we used up the detergent rock and then tried again with a different recipe, but after going through this chiseling process a few times, sam surreptitiously threw away the detergent rock and replaced it with a package of those little cascade multi-pack things—just drop one in and it’s done. convenient, but expensive. oh, well.

another time i instituted a ban on dryer sheets. i researched methods to take static out of clothes in a more economical way. i filled a spray bottle with fabric softener from the dollar tree, cut up into rags an old, ratty pair of sam’s shorts that were languishing in a drawer, and took to spraying a few squirts of fabric softener on a rag and tossing it into each dryer load. sam humored me for a few loads. but after his t-shirts started coming out of the dryer with more static than a bunch of balloons, he quietly bought a big box of dryer sheets and placed them in the cupboard next to my spray bottle of fabric softener.

yet another time i stocked up on dishrags from the dollar tree ($1 for three) and outlawed paper towels, which are disposable and therefore represent—to me, at least—money simply thrown away. after sam had to clean up a mess of doggy puke with a cloth rag, he went on a trip to walmart and came home with a six-pack of paper towel rolls.

so, while sam does support my frugal nature, he is less willing to make do with more economical choices than i am. don’t get me wrong—i adore having sam next to me. that would be the ideal situation. but i’m regarding this imminent separation as an opportunity to do a lot of good work on myself and my habits, improvements that can transition into our marriage. that can only be good for our future, right?