Saving and Sacrifice
By Eric Overland
Eric Overland is the head strength and conditioning coach at Abilene Christian University. He’s married to Marcia, a Registered Nurse at Abilene Regional Medical Center, and they have four children: Abby, 8, Micah, 6; Caitlyn, 4; and Jessica, 11 months. Eric shares their story of tough financial decisions, challenges and sacrifices in the first decade of their marriage.
Eleven and a half years ago Marcia and I were married in our college town of Winona, Minn. We started out quite humbly, financially speaking. Marcia was finishing school while I was working as a waiter at a local restaurant. Those days brought meals of bland oatmeal and ramen noodles.
Before we celebrated our first year of marriage, I took a job with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes as the director for Southeast Minnesota, and Marcia got a job as a Registered Nurse at the Mayo Hospital in Rochester, Minn. We purchased a brand new home in a new development. Life was good. We were living the American dream.
During my time with FCA, I also did volunteer work in strength and conditioning with some local high school kids.
One day I was approached by a man who said, “You really like working with athletes, don’t you?”
“Yes!” I replied. “I love it.”
“I used to play hockey at Notre Dame,” he said. “Let me know if you’d ever be interested in an internship there. I’ll call my coach and recommend you.”
Let’s just say it didn’t take me too long to let him know of my interest. I had to jump through many hoops but was eventually able to land a volunteer job interning in the strength and conditioning department at the University of Notre Dame.
In January of 2007, I moved my wife and our 1-year old daughter to South Bend, Ind., so that I could work for free. Yes, you read that right.
My first day on the non-paying job I was handed a bottle and a rag and told to go clean. I cleaned for nearly eight hours that day, and cleaning was a good chunk of what I did for the rest of my volunteer internship.
It took about a month and a half of that before we headed back to Rochester, Minn., so I could work on my master’s degree. A month after moving back, I was called by my Notre Dame internship supervisor and asked to apply for, and was eventually offered, a paid internship. We accepted the position and jumped in with both feet. Unfortunately, we found ourselves jumping into quicksand instead of the concrete we’d hoped to land on.
Marcia struggled to find a job for four months, our house in Rochester sat completely empty, the home we rented in South Bend had problems that forced us to move out after just 2 months, and my internship paid about one-third of what we owed for our mortgage in Minnesota and rent in Indiana. The 10 percent that our parents had taught us to put away each month for emergencies quickly disappeared, and we found ourselves once again eating Ramen noodles and oatmeal for most meals. We reached a point of having literally no money in the bank, no money in our wallets and bills that commanded our attention. We decided to seek help from the government, only to be turned away for vari-ous reasons at each place. We often questioned if we made the right decision. Being tired, hungry, poor, broke and having no friends tempted us to give up, move back to Minneso-ta and see if we could get our old lives back. I often looked at Marcia and said “At least we have each other!” – partially to be funny, but also because it was true.
Those four months were the most challenging of our marriage; the aforementioned problems coupled with the fact that I was working 12-plus-hour days, five to seven days a week. People around us questioned our reasoning for leaving a beautiful home, great pay-ing jobs, family and friends only to work for peanuts. Others told us to file for bankruptcy and/or let the house go back to the bank. We did neither. We are thankful that we had family and close friends who were willing to support us both with their words and financially. Finally, in August it seemed like everything was coming together. Marcia got a job; we found daycare for our daughter, Abby, that would work with my crazy hours; and we found a renter for our home in Minnesota to cover our monthly costs up there.
Everything seemed to be looking up for us, but my job working 5:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. six days a week, plus noon-7 p.m. on Sunday, combined with Marcia’s 2 p.m.-12:30 a.m. hours began taking its toll on our marriage. We eventually lost connection. About one year into our adventure I would look at the woman next to me and have nothing to talk about unless it was Notre Dame Football or our daughter. Our marriage struggled, and my faith in God struggled as well. I often found myself telling God to prove his existence to me.
After a little over a year, I was approached by my boss and told that my internship was over. I went home that night and told Marcia, and we wondered what we would do. The next day, however, my boss told me they were creating a full-time job for me. I was so excited to go home and tell Marcia! This allowed her to stop working full time and in-stead work only a weekend or two a month.
During that time, still owned a second home in Minnesota. We tried to rent it out to help us financially, but that proved to be a mistake (I mean, a “learning opportunity”). After taking my current job at ACU in July 2011, we still owned the house. A few months after moving, we finally sold it – for $25,000 less than what we owed. But after 14 months of pinching pennies and saving dimes – we paid off the difference. Yes, every cent. We brought that last check to the bank with a huge smile on our faces!
During the five years of owning the house and attempting to pay off the debt from the house, we had to make significant changes in our finances, many of which we still practice. We sold our car and bought a rusty jeep that was missing the entire floor on the pas-senger side (yabba dabba doo!). We also cut some monthly expenses like cable (to this day, we still get by on rabbit ears) and internet (still don’t have that either). Even the cheapest cable/internet packages are about $100 a month. Here’s the math: $100 x 12 months = $1200 x 8 years = $9600! Of course, there were a lot of TV shows and games we didn’t watch, but that freed up time to read books and spend quality time together.
We also couldn’t eat out as much. We limited ourselves to once a month; even when we made the 16-hour trek back to Minnesota, we would pack a cooler with sandwiches, drinks and snacks. We also limited our spending outside of the necessities, and if we needed clothes, appliances, etc., we learned to look at secondhand stores, garage sales, eBay and Craigslist. When the holidays came, we bought our kids inexpensive items from the dollar store. Sorry, kids! (No, actually, I’m not; thanks for taking one for the team.) We also limited our Christmas budget for other family members to about $25 and had to be creative looking for deals. They understood, and they still love us.
When all is said and done, we went through some extremely trying times. At the same time, our marriage, our faith in God and so much more were strengthened as a result of our resilience through the challenges.
It’s been nearly eight years since we began that adventure. We both look back on that time as a time of strengthening. At the time we felt weak, but looking back we realize that the only way for us to get strong was to recognize our weakness.
One of my favorite Bible verses of all times is found in Matthew 7:9-11. It says “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your chil-dren, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him.” (Matthew 7:9-11, New International Version)
Sometimes we go through situations in life expecting a fish and a loaf of bread, only to be served what seems, at the time, to be snakes and stones; snakes that scare us, bite us and make us sick; and stones that bruise us and knock us down when we’re hit by them. However, if we keep getting back up, we often look back and can see that although it wasn’t the exact fish and bread we expected, it not only sustained us, but helped us to truly live.
Recently, I was talking with one of my athletes and posed them the following question, “How would it feel if you scored every time you got the ball?” His response was “Awe-some!” I asked him, “Would it? Wouldn’t it get boring if you scored every single time?” We talked briefly about how it isn’t success that brings us joy, but the victory that comes after a struggle. We don’t need to go out looking for struggles and trials, but we shouldn’t be afraid of them either. When you are faced with trials, look for help, and don’t be discouraged if an attempt fails. I think baseball great Babe Ruth said it best: “You just can’t beat the person who won’t give up.”
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