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    Delivered From Debt: A Christian Testimony
    Delivered From Debt: A Christian Testimony
    Delivered From Debt: A Christian Testimony
    Ebook128 pages2 hours

    Delivered From Debt: A Christian Testimony

    By Maria Hawke

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    About this ebook

    In 2007, Maria Hawke had a personal debt of $59,000. She owed $420 per month in interest alone and owed almost double the amount of her rent to creditors in minimum monthly payments. To make matters worse, she was trapped in part-time employment, unable to earn enough to dig herself out of this financial hole. Maria was a defeated Christian, living in sin and carrying burdens of sorrow and emotional pain that had been a deep part of her life. But the Lord miraculously intervened and took her on a 11 year journey to pay off every cent of her debts, repent of her sins and find true salvation and deliverance. Today she is totally debt free; she has not used credit cards for 8 years. But most importantly, she is saved and living for Jesus!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMaria Hawke
    Release dateJan 16, 2016
    ISBN9781311738707
    Delivered From Debt: A Christian Testimony
    Author

    Maria Hawke

    This is where to find my YouTube channel:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1N8JgtAJXCiIZw8-hTZZLQ

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      Book preview

      Delivered From Debt - Maria Hawke

      Repent ye; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

      Matthew 3:2

      "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand:

      repent ye, and believe the gospel."

      Mark 1:15

      All Bible verses included in this book are taken from the King James Version.

      ©2016. Permission granted by the author to reproduce and distribute this book in any audio or written media as long as it is reproduced in its entirety and it is distributed for free.

      Table of Contents

      1. Awakened to a Crisis

      2. Repenting from My Old Ways

      3. Learning to Negotiate With Creditors

      4. Losing My Pride and Finding Work

      5. Selling My Worldly Possessions

      6. Kindness from Christian Friends and Family

      7. The Miracle of My Car and a Little Doggie Named Max

      8. The Miracle of the Tobacco Pipe

      9. My Payment Schedule

      10. Being the Poor and Learning to Steward all of My Income

      11. Losing My Pride to Gain a Far Better Home

      12. Waiting on God for a New Computer

      13. The Man Who Delivered the Couch

      14. Investing in Heaven Rather Than Retirement

      15. God’s Healing Miracles

      16. Staying Faithful to Avoid Relapse

      17. I Owe Others Forgiveness, But God Owes Me Nothing

      18. From Religion to Salvation

      Other Works Mentioned

      Awakened to a Crisis

      In April of 2007 I found myself in a financial crisis. After several months of waiting for my ship to come in from the royalty checks for a book that still hadn’t taken off in sales, I suddenly realized (almost overnight) that increasing interest had caused my minimum credit payments to reach such high levels that I was not going to have the cash to pay the next month’s rent. I knew that I needed to high tail it out of my little duplex within two weeks because I wouldn’t be able to simply promise my landlords the money later. It would never be there. I had to get a cheaper place that I could afford. I went to church that Sunday and cried nonstop through the service. I was asking God to save me from the fate of delinquency on my loans. I was very desperate. In just a couple years since my divorce my debt had increased to over $59,000.

      I know it sounds like I was probably a shopaholic, but I didn’t have a large or expensive wardrobe, had taken no luxury vacations, had not made investments, owned no jewelry, did not spend much on home decorating, and felt that I was pretty frugal with my spending overall. However, I had made a series of very bad financial decisions. Let me list them here: taking a loan of about $33,000 to earn a Master’s degree from a private school, giving my ex-husband about $6,000 for the asking, spending $10,000 to attend writer’s conferences (these were definitely not fun vacations for me) and by paying a large sum to get my book published, using credit cards after my divorce to supplement my income rather than just getting another job or spending less, and renting a $650 per month duplex that was larger than my needs required when there was cheaper housing available for me. The Master’s degree was at my ex-husband’s command, but I gave in knowing it was not what God wanted me to do. The other decisions were completely my own. I had no material wealth or benefits to show for all this spending. My job did not require me to have a Master’s degree, nor would it have hindered me in any way to have gone to the cheaper, public universities. The money I had spent on the book did not pay off as there were no sells to justify it. And my credit card spending was mostly on consumable items that were used up as soon as the money was spent. So I didn’t feel or act like a big spender. Yet I was in serious trouble for not managing my money properly.

      Up to that point in my life, I had never been delinquent on a loan or more than a month late in making a payment on a bill. Just two years before that time I had an excellent credit rating. I had always considered myself to be a very responsible person when it came to money. I carefully attended to paying bills on time and had closed four or five loan accounts in the past as paid in full, including two school loans. I had no excessive lifestyle habits, like gambling, traveling, shopping, smoking, or drugs. The only trip I had taken in the last couple years was business related. I didn’t even own a pet or any nice furniture. And although I love to eat, I must not have done that too much either because most people consider me to be on the slim side. So what had I done wrong?

      Simply put, I had been living above my means for way too long. I was living in a fantasy, funding a lifestyle that, although modest, was more than I had money for. I used credit to pay two years’ worth of taxes, get through a divorce, and publish and market a book. After that point, I began to use credit for basic purchases, thinking that I had no choice because my part-time employment didn’t leave me with enough cash to finance all these expenses. This two year history of poor financial decisions and a little bit of hard luck (not being able to obtain a full time job) had reduced my cash flow to less than zero.

      My plight was the result of two irresponsible behaviors: (1) spending as if I already had the increased income I was expecting to receive if my book took off or if I found full-time employment, and (2) refusing to do the math to plan a budget. On one hand I kept thinking that my income would soon increase, and when it did, I could then catch up on my bills. On the other, I thought that I didn’t need to know how much I was overspending until I was ready to catch up.

      I don’t wish the reader to think that over spending was my only sin at that time of my life. I had many sins that I was in denial about at the time. I was a defeated Christian, living in ignorance of the spiritual bondage that controlled my life. But perhaps God worked so faithfully in me about my irresponsible spending because I was finally willing to acknowledge I was wrong in at least that area. Even though I was in denial about many other sins, God was merciful and gracious to deal with me in this one sin that I had finally become convicted about. Since that time He has continued to faithfully lead me closer to Him and farther from all sin. Although this book focuses on my deliverance from debt and overspending, God has since delivered me from many other sins and is still converting my thinking and actions to conform to His. He is a good God!

      When I first doubted my ability to pay the next month’s rent, I suddenly had the motive to figure my actual spending versus income to see if my doubts where wrong. In other words, I was looking for any hidden dollars in my budget that might be floating around for just such an emergency. On a piece of paper I made two columns. One column was my take home income (after taxes and deductions) per month. The other column listed my minimum monthly payments on each of my 12 loan accounts as well as my monthly rent, gas, food, car insurance and utilities expenses. The math proved there were no hidden dollars available, but what I did find was very surprising. First, I quickly realized that due to increasing interest rates as well as my increasing balances on the credit accounts, I was at that time paying $450 a month in interest alone! That was most of what I was paying in rent a month, yet if I were to only pay that much each month to my creditors for the rest of my life, I would never lower my balances. (By the way, you can calculate what you are spending in interest each month per creditor by dividing the yearly interest rate by 12, and then converting that number to a decimal and multiplying it by your balance.) I also discovered that I owed about $1200 per month in minimum payments to creditors alone! My take home wages were about $1400, plus I had rent coming due in two weeks and still needed gas and food. You see, over the course of two years, as I continued to only make minimum payments on my credit cards while refusing to cut down on spending, my minimum monthly payments kept creeping higher and higher until they had reached this horrifying amount.

      After picking my jaw up from the floor I made some more calculations. I next discovered that the dollar amount in minimum payments to my creditors that month far exceeded what I would owe my landlord in a couple weeks. That really hurt because it meant that my physical survival on this planet was worth less in dollars than my obligations to creditors who had no concern for my personal wellbeing. It also meant that I had put my physical survival below importance to my desired lifestyle. The other realization that really hurt was that, now that I had finally been honest enough to calculate my spending in comparison to income, I realized for the first time that I had NEVER needed those credit cards to survive. My income had always been enough to cover basic food, gas, utilities, modest rent (there were rentals available for $450 and less), car insurance, and a small amount for doctor visits and clothes. The money had always been there! If I had understood that and stayed away from the credit cards I would have avoided the catastrophe altogether. I would have still been in debt for my school loan and financing my book, but not in a crisis.

      Finally, I found that the amount of my most basic expenses (rent, gas to work, minimal groceries, car insurance, and utilities) combined with my minimum payments to creditors equaled more than I had earned that month. This amount did not include all the little extras that I had been paying for up to that time, like eating out, maintaining a website, and purchasing work clothes, renting movies, etc. So, of course, after months of waiting for things to get better, reality had finally set in. The hidden supply of money I had hoped to find did not exist. I was at the brink of either getting evicted for not paying rent or getting turned into collection agencies for not paying my creditors. Neither predicament seemed appealing.

      I had suddenly made a life changing realization: I was poor because I had spent too much, not because I had earned too little. I was bringing home between $1200 and $1400 per month, and I had just realized that I could have paid rent, gas, insurance, and food costs with only $1000.

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