Whelp, here we go.
We’re launching a website.
It’s crazy simply typing that. We. Are. Launching. A. Website. What What!
We know we are late to this whole “blogging” game (so we are totally excited and flattered that you are even here reading this right now!), but we are on a mission to share our message.
Our journey. Our insights. Our knowledge.
And we hope that along the way what we share can help YOU.
Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Ahem.
Hi!
We are Ellie and Jim. (AKA Michelle & James. AKA Shellie and Jimmy. AKA My Belle Michelle and Makeshift Ads. AKA Mickey & Jamie. AKA – Whatever other fun names you want to call us).
And we are the Rognons from The Rognon Project.
You might be asking yourself how do you pronounce Rognon? Don’t worry, you aren’t the only one.
The answer is – there’s a fancy French way of saying it (apparently it’s a French kidney food dish), but Jim grew up pronouncing it Raw-g-non, and that’s what we’re sticking with.
We live in the Potato State of Idaho where Jim works as a college professor for a College University teaching social media design in the visual media field, and I stay home to raise our four independent, amazing little people. Our oldest dude is going into 6th grade this year, and the caboose is starting kindergarten.
Cue adorable family photo. (Aww)
We have fun reading Harry Potter with our kiddos, laughing till our sides hurt with amazing friends and family, and have a slightly unhealthy obsession with peppermint ice cream.
So why launch this website and start The Rognon Project?
Well, before we can jump in and explain how the Rognon Project came about, we need to share what’s been going on in our lives the past several years.
To be frank, our lives have kind of felt like a big mess.
A big, giant-burning-fireball-kind-of-mess.
Like Godzilla-destroying-the-entire-city-kind-of-mess.
It didn’t use to feel that way. In fact, when we were first married things felt pretty amazing. We had some student loan debt, but we chipped away at it like any average couple. We had a few children, we made enough money to live on and reach goals, and life was comfortable.
Things changed in 2013.
The Rough Years
I don’t want to spend a ton of time here so in a nutshell: we lost health insurance in the middle of our last pregnancy (before the new U.S. health care plan was in effect) so we started wracking up medical bills.
We lost our single-income job and had to move in with my parents. We blew through our savings, and when we finally found a new job, it came with a drastic pay cut. The new position was in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska – and we quickly found that there were no rentals available.
I’m talking zero. Zip.
Yeah, it was strange.
We qualified for a 0% down USDA home mortgage, bought a house, quickly found out that with the pay cut we couldn’t afford said house but couldn’t sell the house for 2 years because of said USDA restrictions, and found ourselves bleeding money every month even with my freelance income & Jim taking on sometimes 2-3 extra jobs too. With a newborn and three other young children at home, I tried to increase my revenue from home with several MLM marketing type jobs, but none of them worked out.
Fast forward 2 years to fall 2015 and things started to feel like we were going to finally catch a break. Our work contract was almost up, and our home-selling restrictions were going to be up in March 2016. We applied for other job opportunities and got our home ready to sell when…
Cabela’s, who employed 2,000 of the ~6,000 people in our town, announced there was an activist investor who took a large stake in the company and said it would press for significant changes in the company. And boy did those changes keep coming – first with massive layoffs that came in waves, no new hires, job insecurity and eventually a lot of people jumping ship before they got the ax.
During all that stress, Jim received a job offer teaching at a college university in Idaho. We found ourselves in a hard spot – we had to decide if we were going to stay with our lower-paying, insecure job when we were bleeding money every month OR take the new job offer knowing the odds were we wouldn’t be able to sell our house.
With a lot of prayers, we ended up deciding to take the job, and we moved our family to Idaho.
Aaaaand you guessed it, lost our house.
And dealt with a lot of other fun issues. Nebraska, as it turns out, is a recourse State – meaning you still have to pay back your loan even if you can’t sell it. We also had a USDA home loan (government loan) that is literally a government home loan you cannot default on. (It’s right there in your contract you sign). Since it is a government loan, they can take you to court and siphon money straight from your paychecks to pay them back, which was a scary thought when we were already broke.
We talked to 7 real estate attorneys, 4 bankruptcy lawyers, and 4 financial advisors throughout that next year and they all suggested the same thing – file bankruptcy.
So we did.
Our home was foreclosed, and we filed bankruptcy in August 2017 (and it just barely officially closed last month in April 2019).
It’s hard, depressing, and our credit is ruined. We said goodbye to home ownership for a long time to come, which is hard when you have little ones who like having their own backyard I’ve decided.
During all this time there were some other hard, personal challenges. Jim lost his father to cancer in July 2017. It’s been really hard on him and his family.
The kids and I also didn’t see much of Jim from Jan. 2014 until August 2018 because he was either working 1 – 3 extra jobs, or he was pursuing his MBA at night.
I’ll be honest that while the sacrifice was vital and so worthwhile, it also realistically caused some distance in our marriage and our family simply because we never saw him.
Now, don’t get me wrong – there were A LOT of blessings along the way, especially ones we can see now that we are on the other end of those hard trials. But it definitely wasn’t smooth sailing for several years.
The Rognon Project Is Born
In the middle of our bankruptcy case, Jim and I were talking about how we NEVER wanted to get to the point with our finances again. We never wanted to feel that desperate and ill-prepared again. We wanted to get in charge of our lives again and dig ourselves out of the large hole we dug ourselves (and our sweet kiddos) into.
We have always been dreamers.
Ooookay, okay. Well, maybe not me (very much a realist here, I’m working on it) – but Jim has definitely always been a dreamer.
Before we were married, we created bucket lists and talked about these big dreams we wanted to accomplish. You know things like stepping foot on every continent, having a vast home library with walls and walls filled with our favorite books, and having annual passes to Disneyland to name a few.
Our bucket list has evolved since then I’m sure, but you get the point.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped dreaming and instead found ourselves in constant “survival mode” setting instead. Instead of moving forward, we were treading water, merely trying to keep our head above water. We stopped dreaming of the future, we never planned ahead, and frankly, we weren’t having any fun either continuously stressed about how we were going to afford anything in life.
At the age of 35, we were looking at where we were with our lives and feeling stuck. We weren’t healthy, we weren’t thinking about the future, and we didn’t feel as strong of a connection with each other that we always wanted in our marriage. Our finances, while much better than what they were when we were living in Nebraska, still weren’t that great.
And we were done.
And thus the Rognon Project was born.
We asked ourselves – how do we dig ourselves out? Where do we start? What can we do to be better parents to our kids? How can we have a stronger, more fulfilled marriage? How can we make our health a priority so we can be good examples to our kids and live a better, more vibrant life?
And of course – how in the heck can we bounce back from bankruptcy and over $90,000 in student loans and debt? And how do we still give our kids a happy, loving childhood with great memories in the process?
Our project is to see what we can do to move from our present circumstances and get to where we want to be.
Our project is to work on strengthening our relationships and connections with each other, our children, our extended family, friends and to build up our faith in God and the path He wants us to take in this life.
Our project is to work on improving our health, both mentally and physically. We are working to establish better habits and routines that will set us up for success.
Our project is to fulfill our dreams. Finances are a big part of making that possible. We are working to be more intentional with our days and our time so that we aren’t wasting the time we have on this earth. When we were younger, we had dreams and a bucket list to accomplish. We want to get back to dreaming and savoring every day we have together.
That’s our hope, anyway.
We know that in order to reach our dreams, we need to dig deep, work hard, sacrifice a lot, push ourselves, and stay motivated.
And that’s one of our goals with this website. We want to share a piece of our story with you, and hopefully, along the way, share things that we’ve learned to help anyone else in a situation like we found ourselves in.
We got this! And you’ve got this too!
So excited to read about and follow your journey!