An Engineer and a Brewer Living on $156,000 in Greater Seattle

When I first started publishing Home Economics, I would put the editions featuring women with debt behind the paywall. I know how judgmental people can be, and it felt important to me to add a level of protection. It can be really scary to admit to having debt, and it doesn’t help that the prevailing narrative is that it’s a moral failing. (Unless you’re rich, in which case “debt” is “leverage,” and you’re brilliant for figuring out how to use it to your advantage.) As The Purse community has continually shown to be kind and supportive, I’ve loosened my policy on this some. But it’s hard for me to sum up how much I appreciate the women who choose to share their debt stories.

Today is our second follow-up edition of Home Economics. The writer first shared her story in February 2025. Her life has changed a lot in 18 months. Most notably, she was diagnosed with a serious autoimmune disease, and after a string of bad luck, she and her husband ended up with nearly $40,000 in credit card debt. In the same period, she also decided to take a 34% pay cut in order to find better work-life balance and prioritize her health.

In her first entry, in the section on credit cards, she wrote, “We pay off our balance every month (except one time I think, and I try not to feel guilty about it!). This is super important to me.” In this edition, she writes about how she’s working hard to reframe her feelings about the debt. “A major life-threatening health event and a home emergency should not put people in debt in the richest nation in the world,” she writes.

The feelings that money can drag up are so complicated, and this lovely edition of Home Ec dives into so many of them: fear, sadness, hope, determination, and pride. I can’t help but root for the writer—she’s very thoughtful and self-reflective every step of the way.

Want to share your story? You can fill out the Home Economics form here. We’re trying to get one from every state, and we have a lot of states outstanding. I’d love to publish ones from Mississippi, Tennessee, and New Mexico, just to name a few!

Age: 34
Location: Greater Seattle Area
Relationship status: Married
Age of partner: 42

About me: I am the author of Home Economics No. 23, and I wanted to do a follow-up since some big things have changed in my life since my first entry. I’m a disabled queer tech worker—I have autism, and in the past year I’ve also navigated some serious health issues. My husband graduated from engineering bootcamp into one of the worst tech job markets, so now he works as an assistant brewer while he puts the tech job search on hold.

Income:

Your job title/salary: Technical support engineer; $116,000
Partner’s job title/salary: Assistant brewer, $22 per hour, roughly 30 to 35 hours per week (works out to about $40,000 a year)
Your monthly take-home pay (paycheck amount after taxes and other deductions): $7,101
Partner’s monthly take-home pay (paycheck amount after taxes and other deductions): ~$1,200. This varies because he is not full time; sometimes during the busy summer season, he will work 40+ hours (and gets overtime for hours over 40).
Side hustle: I still work one or two river trips a year for the nonprofit I have been involved with for the past 15+ years. This nets out to about $1,000, but a lot of this goes toward the cost of travel there and gear expenses. That’s okay with me! I also have a small Substack that brings in about $10 a month. I keep all the content there free, but some people still choose to support, which is incredible!
Total monthly income: ~$8,301

Account balances:

Checking account balance: $2,653
Savings account balance: $3,427
High-yield savings account balance: N/A
Monthly contribution to savings account: About $500
Retirement account(s) balance:
- My Roth IRA: $109,980
- Inherited traditional IRA: $37,259
- My 401(k) from my old employer: $14,464
- My current employer’s 401(k): $1,054
- My husband’s Roth IRA: $3,028
- My husband’s old work 401(k): $616.45
- I just submitted the paperwork recently to roll each 401(k) into a new traditional IRA, respectively. The long-term goal is that we will slowly move funds from our traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs so that when we retire, we will each just have one Roth IRA and 401(k).
Monthly contribution to retirement accounts: $524.24 ($446.16 of that is from me via paycheck deduction and $78.08 is an employer match). This was about 5% of my pay, but after talking with my CFP, we are dropping this to 1% and will instead put the money in my personal Roth. This is because the investment options in my work 401(k) aren’t that great, and the match is a little wonky with some strings. (There’s a theme throughout this Home Ec—I highly recommend getting a great CFP!)
Investment account balance: $767.25. But after talking with my CFP, we are transferring this to my checking account so we can put it toward debt.
Monthly contribution to investment accounts: $0
529 account balance: $0. We do not have kids or plan to. We considered creating/contributing to accounts for our niece and nephew, but upon guidance from our CFP (and also reading How To Be A Rich Old Lady), we decided to put the amount we would have contributed to a 529 into our IRAs, because our niece and nephew are the beneficiaries of these accounts.
Emergency fund balance: This is our savings account.
Goals-oriented savings accounts: N/A, but I want to get this going again after we get out of debt.

Total in checking, savings, and investment accounts: $ 167,168.70

Housing:

Size of your home: We own a three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath condo.
Mortgage: $2,788. This went down from the last time I submitted because we got enough equity to remove the private mortgage insurance (PMI)!
Current home value: ~$325,000
Current mortgage balance: $247,036
Year you bought your home: 2022
Price you paid for your home: $315,000
Mortgage interest rate: 5.625%
How much was your down payment? $10,000, or about 3%. This was the smallest amount we could put down to get a mortgage.
How long did it take you to save for the down payment? We bought our house in a roundabout way. We got to be close friends with an elderly neighbor, and we frequently took care of her cat. When she died, her family offered to sell us her condo for less than market value. (It saved them the hassle of hiring a real estate agent and going through all the steps of listing it.) We weren’t planning on buying at the time, so we didn’t really have the savings for a down payment. I ended up taking $10,000 out of my Roth IRA. It was penalty-free because it was for a first-time home purchase. Without it, we could not have bought our home. (We also happily took her cat because her family couldn’t take on another pet.)
Did you have any family help buying your home? My mom gave us $5,000, which was the extra cash we needed in savings to get a mortgage. I know this was a stretch for them, and I have a feeling they took it out of their retirement. Without it, we would not have been able to purchase our home.
Property taxes: $258 a month. We live in a state with higher property taxes because there is no income tax. However, Washington State is apparently only 30th in the nation in terms of property taxes, so it doesn’t feel too high. I personally prefer higher property taxes as opposed to paying income tax, but I fully support the new state millionaires’ tax, because...millionaires.
Homeowner’s insurance: $46. And boy howdy was it worth it for us last year! More below.
Electricity: $124. I just started doing budget billing, where the electric company averages your previous 12 months of usage and uses that amount as your bill for the next 12 months. I like knowing the set number.
Water: Included in our HOA
Cell phone: $161 for me and my husband. This includes insurance on his phone (I go without), unlimited talk/text/data for us in the U.S. and for me internationally. It also includes a hotspot that I use occasionally and Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+, which we use often.
Internet: $80 for unlimited gigs. My husband did the hard job of negotiating with the internet company to get this rate.
Housekeeper: N/A. We cut this out when I took a lower-paying job. Our cleaner was not doing a very good job anyway near the end, so it worked out.
Gardener: Included in our HOA fees. We have a small personal green patch in the front and side of our condo, and I love taking care of my own plants.
HOA fees: $524. These go up yearly. However, my husband used to serve on the board, and we know that the fees are going to actual upkeep. We will also have two special assessments this year, equal to two months of extra fees. It used to be just one. I am less keen on the second one, because the money is just being used to fill up the reserve fund due to changes in condo laws in Washington State.

Transportation:

Monthly car payment: $0. We own both our vehicles, which are slightly older reliable models (2010 and a 2018). Not having auto debt has been very important for me. Getting the 2018 car in 2023 felt so swanky!
Car insurance payment: $208 for both vehicles
Gas: ~$100. Ha, what a hot-button topic! Luckily, I still work from home. My husband’s job is less than a 10-minute drive away. We often take the light rail when going into the city.
Car maintenance: ~$300 a year
Parking: ~$25 if we go into the city
Monthly public transportation: ~$20 if we go to the city (it’s about $3 each way). A lot of people don’t pay (it’s not a gated entry like NYC), but I really value our system and have no issue contributing.
Rideshares (Uber, taxi, etc.): We really only use rideshares on vacation, so it depends.

Children:

Number of children and their ages: We don’t have kids, and we don’t plan to.

Debts:

Student loan total balance: $48,240.69. These are my husband’s loans. The federal college loans are from before he met me. We also took out a loan of $16,801 to pay for him to attend coding bootcamp. It took us a little less than two years to pay it off.

It’s too bad that he graduated from the coding program into such a bad job market. He spent a long time looking for a tech job, and finally we decided it was best if he just took the assistant brewer job and took a break from the job search. That said: If a Purse reader knows of any jobs…
Student loan monthly payment: $327 for his federal student debt. Until last month, we also had a $700 monthly payment for my husband’s bootcamp. Now that is done, the money will go toward paying off the credit card debt.

My husband’s loans were part of the SAVE plan that the Trump administration discontinued this month. It’s disappointing, because we had really hoped that under the Biden administration we might see some loan forgiveness. We’ve moved him to a different plan, and his monthly payments went up slightly.
Personal loan total balance: N/A
Credit card balance (if you carry a balance month to month):
- $17,823.10 at 21%
- $20,417.19 at 0%. We did a balance transfer from an interest accruing card to a card with no interest.
How did you accrue the credit card debt? This is where we have had some major changes this year. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve carried a significant balance on my credit cards. Last year, shortly after I published my initial Home Ec, I got diagnosed with a life-changing autoimmune disease. The diagnosis helped explain some ongoing health issues, but it was very challenging. From June to October 2025, I was going to at least three medical appointments a week. At the time, I was on a high-deductible health plan, so I had to pay thousands out of pocket. Even when I hit the out of pocket max, some of my therapies still weren’t covered. There was lots of fighting with insurance, and we chose just to pay for treatment. My disease is highly affected by stress.

Then in November 2025, our house flooded after a pipe burst. We spent almost three months living with my sister and dealing with our homeowners’ insurance. Even though we had coverage, the damage maxed out, so we still had to pay about $15,000 out of pocket (insurance covered about $30,000). The costs ballooned because they found mold and asbestos. We even did some of the work ourselves to cut costs.

I have never been a chill person, but I was working at a job that was wearing me down to the bone. I was making $175,000 but worked 60+ hour weeks and was on-call during weekends and holidays. It took a toll on me, my health, and my relationships. I knew I needed to make a change, and I started job hunting for a position that was not in management. This past February, I started at a great company with much better benefits and work-life balance, but I took a pay cut of almost $60,000 annually. We’re still tightening up the finances, but it’s been SO worth it.

Reading The Purse and other publications like Healthy Rich have helped me not to be ashamed of debt. It’s not a personal failing. These two catastrophic things—a major life-threatening health event and a home emergency—should not put people in debt in the richest nation in the world. But they do. Through it all, we have absolutely been privileged, and I know we will pay it off. Not all Americans have that ability, and I firmly believe in UBI, robust social programs, Medicare for All, and housing as a human right.
Credit card monthly minimum payment (if you carry a balance): I put about $5,000 toward the balance (which is spread across two cards) each month. I don’t have a specific debt payoff plan (like snowball vs. avalanche). I’m just trying to be consistent about paying off as much as I can each month. We did move some of the debt over to a zero-interest credit card. Even though we had to pay a balance transfer fee, I feel like it bought me a little more time. Now that we’re finished paying off the bootcamp debt, we’ll put an additional $700 a month toward the credit card debt.
How much do you spend on your credit card(s) each month? We use credit cards to pay most monthly bills listed here, minus the mortgage, insurance, and HOA. I’d say we charge around ~$4,000 each month.

Food:

Groceries: $700. We’ve been trying to cut back here, and I feel like we could do better. One small thing we did is start buying food from Safeway rather than the local specialty market. My husband is a former chef, and when I used to work river tours more regularly, one of my jobs was to prepare the meals. Basically, for years, neither of us had jobs that required us to eat most of our meals at home. I think we’re still getting used to it. I’m trying to become a better meal planner. We’ll sit down and write out what the meals will be for the week. My husband has a hard time cooking just for the two of us, and often there’s a lot of leftovers, or we’ll invite friends to join us. We like to host a big dinner at least once a month or so.
Dining out: $400. Food is definitely our form of entertainment. But we’ve gotten into a routine where once a week we’ll go out for coffee, once a week we’ll order Doordash, and once a week we’ll go out to dinner on a date. And we’ll go out to a bar for happy hour once a week to meet friends.

Socializing and Entertainment:

Subscriptions (streaming services, magazines, etc.):
- Spotify: $19 for a family plan
- Netflix: $25 for a family plan
- Apple TV: $10 for family plan
- Peacock: $6 for family plan
- My sister sends me money for her share. We share Paramount+ and HBO with my brother-in-law. My husband really loves TV and movies. If it was just me, I would only have Netflix so I could watch Gilmore Girls. I want to start rotating subscriptions monthly, though.
Memberships (museums, etc.): N/A
Movies, concerts, other events: We go to the movies about once every two months for a date night. Last year, when the local theater had a holiday sale, I bought gift cards at a discount, so this year, our movies have been mostly “free.” We cut down our concert budget this year in service of paying down debt.
Entertaining and socializing other: This is mostly covered in other categories. Our high grocery bill includes the dinners we cook for five or so friends once a week when they come over to watch shows like The Traitors and Survivor.
Hobbies: I love to garden and read. I recently started power lifting, which has really helped my disease. My husband loves TV, movies, and video games. Now that summer is here, we’ll spend more time hiking and kayaking!
Travel: For our main trip this year, we joined my husband’s brother and sister-in-law and their two kids for a cruise in Alaska. It had been planned for a while, and the whole trip cost us about $3,000 each (including all fees, excursions, drink packages, shows, etc.) for the week. There was no airfare because the ship leaves from Seattle. It’s not a vacation I would have chosen for myself. I get a little motion sick, but I got a prescription for motion sickness patches. It ended up being one of the most relaxing vacations I’ve ever been on. Alaska is stunning, and I had a great time being with the family but also having separate space. I loved being able to have a set room for the whole time and only having to unpack once.

Miscellaneous:

Clothing: Minimal. As I mentioned in my last entry, I hate paying full price for clothing. I got a new snowboard jacket last year for ~$160, which retailed at full price for $449. I love sales, and I am not afraid to ask for a price match! This coat will last me 15+ years.
Home supplies: This is included in our grocery costs, because we lump in Costco and Target in that category.
Exercise: $54 for a YMCA membership for both of us. One of the perks of my new job is they pay for my portion of it (so the membership was originally $129 total; $75 for me and $54 for my husband).
Personal and self-care (haircuts, manicures, massages, etc.): My husband cuts his own hair. I get a full cut twice a year for about $75. My husband trims mine in between salon visits. Last year I got myself an Olive + June gel nail polish kit for manis and pedis at home. I love it! I probably only use it every other month, and there is a learning curve, but it’s worth it to cut down on salon costs.
Pet expenses: We include their food and litter in our grocery bill.
Pet insurance: $62 for our two cats. The cat we adopted from our neighbor died last year due to kidney cancer, which was very sad. We spent about $750 on his care until we reached the deductible.
Donations: My stance on mutual aid still stands, especially for people I meet experiencing homelessness: I give all the cash I have, no questions asked. I also donate to whatever GoFundMe fundraisers come across my desk. The biggest change is that we created a trust this year, and upon both of our deaths, 10% of the total will go to charity (5% to the youth outdoors nonprofit I work with and 5% to the friary where my brother-in-law is a monk). It cost us about $5,000 to do all the estate planning, and we worked with a local lawyer.
Tithing: My husband tithes about $20 a week. If I join him for mass and have cash, I will put that in the collection plate.
Events (birthday parties, etc.): In the past few years, we’ve been going on a small trip (like a local ski weekend) for our wedding anniversary, at a cost of about $400 for a weekend. Our fifth wedding anniversary is in 2028, so we want to plan for a trip to Japan to go to Tokyo Disney and to snowboard in Hokkaido!
Gifts: $600 a year for presents for kids in our life. We have a niece, nephew, and godson. We love treating them all. (Would some call it spoiling? Sure!) We see our niece and nephew two to three times a year and our godson once a year. We also cover costs for things like movies, presents, meals, etc., when we see them. We try to plan with their parents on timing so we can give them some free child care time, too!
Other: $99 a year for Copilot Money. $350 annually for an accountant. Our CFP fee is based on a percentage (0.5%) of our assets under management. I love our CFP, and his services are well worth the price.

Insurance:

Life insurance: This included at no cost to us as part of my employment for up to $100,000 each.
Health insurance: $10.71 a month for medical, dental, and eye care for both me and my husband. This is a huge benefit of my new job. This is a paycheck deduction.
FSA contribution: $340 for the healthcare FSA. This is a paycheck deduction.
HSA contribution: None, because I no longer have a HDHP.

Total monthly spending (includes annual expenses divided by 12): $6,675 + ~$5,000 toward credit card payoff

Tell us more:

What are your top financial priorities?
Paying off debt is my top priority right now.
How do you feel about your current financial situation?
I feel okay. I’ve come a long way since viewing debt as the absolute worst thing that could happen to a person. I grew up in an evangelical church, and it’s such a shame-based system. They make you feel bad about everything—about your body, about sex, about money. My parents were never shaming, but it was hard to get away from the church’s culture. My dad is a classic saver. Both he and my mom were teachers, and my mom stayed home with us when we were little, so we never had a ton of money. And he often seemed stressed about money.

I also grew up listening to Dave Ramsey, and he’s so anti-debt and always shaming people. He goes so far as to say that people should pay for their houses with all cash, which is insane. But I took it as fact and believed it until I was in my 20s and an advisor finally showed me the math and how important it is to have money in the market and not just tied up in a house.

Now that I have the debt—and thanks to publications like The Purse and Healthy Rich—I’ve come to understand it’s not a moral failing. I have a plan to pay it off, we are sticking to it, and it’s working.

I know as long as we don’t touch our retirement, we will be fine.
How is your financial situation or approach different from 5/10/15 years ago?
As recently as 2020, I never made more than $30,000 a year. My husband (boyfriend at the time) and I both worked in hospitality and tourism and never thought we could buy a house or travel abroad. It was a pipe dream to think I could make $60,000 someday.

I went to grad school, the pandemic happened, I changed industries, and now I make more than most people in the United States. I don’t say that to brag (though I am proud of myself). I am smart and skilled, but I also got lucky by getting into tech when I did. There is a lot of fear and bullshit in the industry now.
What are your money stressors?
The credit card debt is hard for me, but my mindset has come a long way. It’s also stressful for me being the CFO of the family, but money really stresses out my husband. We’re both queer, but from the outside, it looks like our traditional gender roles are swapped. It’s hard because talking about capitalism stresses him out so much that I often feel like I have to shoulder it alone. Therapy helped us work out a system to talk about it. We call it “Calendars and Cocktails,” and we set a date to discuss and pair it with a fun drink to celebrate.
Do you expect to receive (or have you received) an inheritance from a family member?
When my parents pass, their house will be given to me and my sister equally. We will likely sell it and split the proceeds. It’s worth around $600,000, with a mortgage of $100,000.

I love my parents and know how hard they have worked to pass that down to us. They are both public school teachers (one retired, one not) who did so much for us despite being paid so little. I tear up a bit thinking about how much they sacrificed for us.

Right after I graduated from college, my aunt passed. She didn’t have kids and was very close to my sister and me. The money we got from her is why my retirement is in such a good place.
Do you receive any financial support from your family?
As I mentioned in the housing section, my mom gave us $5,000 so we could qualify for our mortgage. But we don’t get regular financial support from them.
Do you financially support any family members beyond yourself and your nuclear family?
No, but we will if they need it. We also cover all “fun” expenses with my parents (treating them to dinner, trips, sports tickets, etc.). It’s the least I can do.
How do you and your partner split your finances? How did you decide to go that route?
All of our money is 100% both of ours in spirit. In practice, I manage almost all of it because I like to, and I’m better at it. Like I mentioned earlier with our gender roles, I hold most of the keys, which is kind of weird. My husband knows how to access all of the accounts, but he never does. We each have our own checking account that we keep a small amount in for our own “fun” purchases. We talk to each other about any purchase over $100 (not counting groceries, bills, etc.).
What are you willing to sacrifice to meet financial goals?
We’ve cut down quite a bit on our entertainment, food, and travel budget. That is just fine by me. We’re both used to being relatively poor, so it feels like how most of our adult lives have been outside of the past five years.
What are you NOT willing to sacrifice to meet financial goals?
Health and work-life balance. That is the biggest thing I have learned this year. Everything comes at a price. I’ve come to recognize the importance of saying no to things and recognizing that opportunity costs are really important. I intentionally downshifted to a lower-paying, less stressful job, and it’s been much better for my health. I was always an overachiever, but these days, I just want to make a healthy impact and not go above and beyond.
Tell us about one financial accomplishment you’re proud of.
I am proud that I finished my undergrad and grad school with no debt. I am proud that I own a home and don’t have PMI on the mortgage. I am proud of our investments. I am proud of myself for how I handle our finances.
What is one financial goal(s) you still want to achieve?
Paying off the debt, as mentioned. We also want to save $5,000 for our hopeful Japan trip in 2028. I also want to save more for retirement (in a CoastFI way), so I can go back to working in my original field (river conservation).
What do you regret spending your money on the most?
I get annoyed sometimes about my husband using Doordash or spending so much on streaming, but he pulls it back when we need to. He doesn’t judge my spending, and as long as we are on track budget-wise, I don’t want to judge his.
What is one thing you spend money on that makes your life better?
This year it’s really been medical care. Also our YMCA membership.
What is one thing you spend money on that drives you crazy?
Nothing now that my PMI is gone :) I understand our costs and why they are important to each of us.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
I was really scared to submit this and admit to our debt. I have been so heartened by the previous posters who talk frankly. I hope this helps people realize that debt is not a moral failing.