MEET MR. MOM

Tony learned the hard way that his job was not recession-proof

TONY AND MARY TAHKEAL weren’t prepared when he lost his job in late 2011. They had an emergency fund of $500 and even that was a struggle to scrape together. And they were dealing with credit card debt—much of it for groceries and lifestyle purchases like clothing—that at one point was $28,000.

Like most people, they didn’t build up that kind of debt overnight. It really started back in the 1990s when Tony was “young and dumb,” as he says.

“I was in college full-time and working full-time, but what did I do? I went and bought a car!”

Tony and Mary had just welcomed their little girl, Taylor, into the world to join their young son, Chris, when the suspension went out on their old vehicle. So rather than repair it, they went to a dealership and got a little Nissan Sentra.

But having two car seats in the back was tight, so they returned the car to the dealer after two or three days and explained they needed a bigger vehicle.

“We walked by a brand-new ’95 Nissan Pathfinder, which was way out of our ballpark. Here I am with two kids, a job, and college, and I about fell over when we got approved [for the loan]. It was $500 a month,” Tony recalls.

“We didn’t drink our money away, we didn’t smoke it away, and the only thing I can relate it back to was car payments. That led to credit card use for groceries and credit card use for clothes because all of our money went to paying credit cards. Because we were good at making our credit card payments, we got another credit card. Then three credit cards later, we were like, ‘There’s something wrong here!’”

Now they’ve given up the credit cards and have gone to a cash-only lifestyle. They’re in the process of getting out of debt, doing what the economists call “deleveraging.” But it’s going to be a long climb out.

Tony is a member of a Native American tribe called the Yakama Nation. He grew up on a reservation in Yakima, Washington. Mary, meanwhile, is Caucasian.

In 2007, Tony and Mary left their hometown of Yakima so he could take a job as an X-ray technician at Memorial Hospital North in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The pay was in the mid-$50,000s and Tony thought the position was recession-proof.

Life was good at the base of the Rocky Mountains. The couple bought a home with a view of picturesque Pikes Peak—the mountain with the vista that inspired the lyrics to “America the Beautiful.”

But in September 2011, the amber waves and purple mountains turned to pink as Tony received a layoff notice at work.

“The office I worked at was a small one-person diagnostic X-ray room, away from the [main] hospital. Working [there] meant I could clock out at five p.m., as opposed to the hospital, which never closes,” Tony says.

“[But] X-ray departments don’t make money with good old-fashioned diagnostic X-rays utilized by one person . . . so to lose my job was not a shocker by any means. In years past, the hospital could absorb that cost, but not when budgets aren’t being met.”

Fortunately, Mary became a licensed massage therapist in Colorado around this time. With her specialty in therapeutic postinjury medical massage, she was pulling in about $25 an hour doing massage work. But it wasn’t steady income.

The anxiety of having a mortgage and no steady full-time work was a great burden on the family. Their debt level and lack of savings put them on the road to considering bankruptcy.

“Mary was losing sleep at night, worried about the finances, but I failed to notice. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. I saw signs of stress but didn’t connect the dots,” Tony says. “She felt responsible for our financial woes, and I couldn’t relieve her guilt. I got a second job working part-time evenings [while still at the hospital], but our financial house of cards still came crashing down.”

As their debt became more unmanageable, they bit the bullet and filed for bankruptcy. Tony and Mary initially thought they would at least be able to keep their home. But that wasn’t how it would play out.

“We had to include our home, and add ourselves to the nation’s foreclosure statistics. Then to add insult to injury, we had to wait about eight months for our bankruptcy hearing, due to the volume of bankruptcies at that time,” Tony says. “It was like a lingering cloud hovering over us, reminding us of our financial failure. We just wanted to file and move on with our lives.”

And that’s exactly what they did. The Tahkeals made the decision to move back home to Washington to be near extended family.

In doing so, they had to make the difficult choice to move their daughter Taylor, now eighteen, during her scholastically and socially all-important senior year in high school. The couple’s other child, twenty-year-old Chris, was already out on his own at the time.

Upon returning to Washington, the Tahkeals decided that Tony should stay home and run the household while Mary worked full-time at her newfound career.

Tony didn’t appreciate how much goes into maintaining a home because his wife had done it since the birth of their children. His job was to earn the paycheck and bring it home during that time.

Thankfully, Michael Keaton and a certain touchstone 1983 comedy were there to help him through the transition.

“I rented Mr. Mom after being laid off. I figured I’d prepare myself for daily home life,” Tony jokes. “I didn’t feel like less of a man [for losing my job], but I did feel bad for moving my daughter during her senior year. Other than that, my self-worth wasn’t affected.”

A lot of guys really had a bull’s-eye on their backs during the early days of the Great Recession. The Financial Times of London reported that men’s jobs accounted for 80 percent of the jobs that were lost during the first two years of our nation’s financial troubles beginning in 2007. That’s because the recession really hit male-dominated sectors of the economy like construction and manufacturing.

While Tony was in the more female-leaning health care sector, he was not immune to job loss. And just like that, Tony became part of what the Census Bureau says is a growing group of 189,000 at-home fathers across the country.

What surprised him most about going from breadwinner to homemaker?

“I learned that the dishes are never done! I learned I’m a terrible cook. The house always needs something, be it laundry, lawn mowing, dog walking . . . fill in the blank here. When I clocked out at work, I was done. I’d go home. You can’t clock out at home!”

Today Mary brings home an annual income of $35,000 doing therapeutic massage in Washington. That’s roughly $20,000 less than the family lived on in Colorado, but the drop in income is offset by the lower costs of living in a single-wide mobile home.

I love Tony and Mary’s story because it shows that families make changes as necessary to survive. The Tahkeals were able as a couple to figure out how to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads when times got tough.

If there’s one thing Tony wants readers to take away from his story, it is that you can’t underestimate the value of being financially prepared for the unknown. And that you can lose a job even in a supposedly recession-proof field like health care. Saving money today creates more breathing room in your life when the going gets tough.

Still, Tony feels blessed.

“I’d have to say we’re fortunate. Fortunate that my job loss was cushioned by my wife’s budding massage career. Fortunate enough to return home where we have extended family—extended family that we can rely on when needed [like for] auto repairs. Or vice versa, as I’ve become the family baby-sitter for my nieces and nephews.”

The story of the Tahkeals is a very real and relatable one. What lessons can you take away from it?

Prepare for a rainy day.

• If you unexpectedly faced a sudden expense of $2,000 in your life, could you handle it? A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that right around 50 percent of Americans couldn’t. They’re like Wile E. Coyote in those old cartoons, out over the edge of the cliff and looking down.
• I know there are some circumstances that just blindside you financially in life. But let me ask you this: How much could you come up with per week? One dollar? Two? Ten dollars? Whatever it is, start taking it and stashing it away. I don’t care if you put it in a jar in your house. Just start the process of building a reserve. If it’s $10 a week, that becomes $500 over the course of a year.
• Maybe you can just take your change and throw it into a jar at the end of the day. Or take all your $1 bills out of your wallet each night and put them aside as a way of forced savings. Just do something. Start saving for a rainy day before the rainy day actually comes.

Go low-tech to manage your money.

• If you’re having trouble managing your money, I want you to be like the Tahkeals and pay in cash for whatever you can. One of my favorite ways to do that is to use envelopes to divvy up your money and keep within a budget.
• If you’ve never done this before, you simply take envelopes and write “groceries” on one, “utilities” on another, “walking around money” on a third, whatever it is in your life that requires money. Then each payday, take out the dollar amount you need until next pay period and split it up among your envelopes. When one envelope empties, you either take money from another envelope or you do without until the next payday.
• I often tell couples to do this particular method of budgeting. I once sat down with a couple that had more than $30,000 in credit card debt. We came up with a thirty-month plan for them to get out of debt that involved the envelope method. They didn’t think it would work, but they paid off their credit card debt in twenty-one months!

Or try a high-tech method.

• Imagine walking into a store and having your smartphone automatically tell you whether or not you have enough money in your account to make a purchase. That’s the premise of a new app called Wink.
• This free mobile app uses your phone’s GPS and geo-fencing technology to know immediately when you walk into a store. Once you’re in the door, Wink will automatically pop up a message with your account balance so you can know at a glance how your finances stand. No need to fumble around pulling up your mobile banking app and entering your username and password to manually check your account balance.
• My hope is you’ll never pay a $35 overdraft fee again thanks to this free app for iOS and Android. Visit IsMoreThan.com to sign up as a beta tester.

Find support if you’re a stay-at-home dad.

• Men account for only 3.6 percent of all at-home parents, according to Census Bureau data. That means being a man at home with kids can be isolating. But it doesn’t have to be. There’s a national organization for men in this situation called the National At-Home Dad Network (AtHomeDad.org) that has an online list of dad groups throughout two dozen states and Canada.
• The Wall Street Journal ran a recent story on at-home dads and noted that local groups like the seven-hundred-member NYC Dads Group (NYCDadsGroup.com) arrange play dates for dudes with kids, “dad’s night out” events at sports bars and pool halls, and even bracket betting pools. Who says March Madness is just for the office?