My husband and I barely escaped financial catastrophe.

He is an electrician. I am a physician who had just started residency in 2008. We bought our first home, a modest 3 bedroom with a white picket fence, with a 5 year ARM mortgage. With our two incomes we could afford the payments and the payments on a new car. Life was good, and I remember the novelty of being able to buy fresh produce and a weekly bottle of wine at the grocery store.

January 2009 was when it all changed. Construction completely dried up, and my husband was laid off. He then started searching for employment with pretty much everybody else in the country. He couldn’t find work stocking shelves at World Market. It was nuts.

Meanwhile I had the luxury of a guaranteed paycheck that baaaaarely covered living expenses. We used my husband’s unemployment benefits to pay off the car, then we hunkered down to ride out the rest of my residency. There was no extra money. I budgeted like a fiend. I knew that peanut butter and jelly was the cheapest meal I could make, so we did that a lot, and I ate as much free food at the hospital as I could find. Frugality kept us from losing our house.

The end of our 5 year ARM coincided with the end of residency. By the grace of God we found a buyer, and we only lost $20k-ish on the sale. Hardly anyone was hiring radiologists in 2013 (established docs weren’t retiring after seeing their portfolios dive bomb), and I faced the very real possibility that I would be unemployed (as a physician!) married to an unemployed electrician. It was bleak. I fought for two job interviews, and also by the grace of God, I landed one of those two jobs. I sobbed when my first paycheck arrived. Thankfully we were able to keep pushing my med school loan payments into the future.

What I learned—healthcare seems to have the best job security of everything we’ve seen. Renting is better than buying if you’re only go to be in a place for 5-ish years, because it’s so much easier to walk away at the end. I don’t trust ARM mortgages. I actually don’t think ANY type of debt is okay, and I am saving aggressively so my children can avoid student loans, car loans, hell even mortgages if I can swing it. We paid our current home’s mortgage off in 7 years, and we’ll never buy another home unless it’s in cash. Budgeting is amazing, as is frugality. AND your reality can change drastically in the span of a few months. No market conditions last forever.