He was alone in a hotel room. It was his birthday. His coworkers at the conference had no idea.
Maggie’s husband travels roughly half of each month for work. He'd already missed their daughter's third birthday two weeks earlier. He is not a crier. In ten years together, Maggie had seen him cry twice. On that call, he broke down.
"I missed our daughter's birthday. No one knew it was my birthday today. What was this all for? What are we doing and why?"
Something broke down in Maggie, too.
Three years earlier, they made a plan. Savings in place, a bigger house bought in anticipation of a second baby, ready to shift from dual income to one while their family grew. But the pregnancy turned out to be high-risk, the baby spent time in the NICU, and between that and the rising cost of childcare, Maggie decided not to return after maternity leave. They ran the numbers and knew it made the most sense. Three days after she gave notice, Maggie’s husband was laid off.
Nearly overnight, their household income dropped to about 25 percent of what it had been. Between NICU bills, student loans, and a new mortgage, they turned to credit cards to stay afloat while he rebuilt a career in commission-based sales. The balances climbed while the savings shrank. Maggie needed income.
"I can't afford childcare, but I can take care of children."
She opened a daycare in their house. She got her real estate license. She started a home bakery on the side.
"I have the entrepreneurial bug in spades," she says. And in the same breath: she is at capacity. And yet from the outside, they look like they are doing well.
"I Have Paid Off More Things Than I Have in the Last Three Years"
After she hung up the phone, Maggie went to the basement. It had become the catch-all spot: three years of life-stuff piled into one space to be dealt with later.
"My biggest fault," she says, "is that I want to do something 100% or I don't do it. So I had been putting off the basement. I had been putting off facing the music with how bad the financial picture was."
She turned her phone camera on, hit record, and started cleaning and organizing.
For the first time she said the goal out loud, on the internet, where other people could hear it: pay off the debt by her husband's next birthday, March 2027.
Maggie also committed to posting every day during her one free hour, which is nap time. She decided to build the account around three things that all happen to start with the same letter: family, faith, and finances. ("A little bit dorky, but that's okay. That's me.") She is not, by her own admission, a social media person. She became one anyway.
A few weeks in to posting, Maggie’s mom called. She wasn't sure this was a good idea, wasn't sure what people would think of Maggie for putting the debt on the internet.
"I told her I have gotten more things done in the past 25 days. I've been more productive. I've learned more about myself. I have paid off more things than I have in the last three years."
She is also, in real time, finding out that a lot of other parents have been waiting for someone to say the quiet part out loud.
"Parents carry enough," she says. "You don't also need to carry huge amounts of guilt for being in debt and not being great with finances when you're also juggling everything else."
The Start of the Whole Picture
Maggie just started using Monarch. She vets things intensely before paying for them now. What she wants is to offload what she's been doing by hand, by herself at night in a notebook. One place to see the whole picture, a system she can trust, and a debt payoff visualization she can work toward instead of clawing her way out an hour at a time.
"Sometimes you're building it, but you're not there yet. And the building can look really rocky. And that's okay to acknowledge."
Maggie sees Monarch as a potential solution to reduce the worry and workload.
We see Maggie as a motivator. She is someone whose authenticity can spark change within her own home and beyond. Her willingness to face the reality of financial stress head on and make meaningful change is a story of resilience that is often told on the other side, not in the messy middle. We’d like to change that.
You can follow Maggie’s daily posts on Instagram at @tidbitofpositivity.
