Helen and her husband Bob began buying, fixing up and flipping houses in central Florida in 2002. They used credit cards to finance the home repairs, and then paid off that debt when the house sold. Helen says the business did well in the beginning, but by 2006, everything started to unravel.

“We were doing it before the frenzy started, and we did okay until the very end,” she recalls. “Looking back we should have known; when everybody is talking about (an investment), it’s time to leave. My husband didn’t work except for re-doing the houses, so we used the money from the real estate sales to live on. If we had saved it, it would have been different.”

In the end, they had to pay to get out of two houses, and had $66,000 in credit card debt on six cards from the repairs. The renters in their last investment property moved out in 2008. “The house was worth a quarter of what we had paid for it, and the tenants destroyed it, so we couldn’t rent it without putting a lot of money into it,” Helen says. They are negotiating to do a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure, in which they return the property to the bank. (If the bank later sells it for less than the mortgage amount, it can try to collect the difference from the owner. But banks typically don’t proceed if they recognize they can’t recover funds from the borrower.)

Overwhelmed by their finances, the couple joined a Bible study group through Crown Ministries, where they met a financial advisor who volunteered to help. His first advice: Get a real budget. “We were using Quicken to track our expenses, but he kept saying, ‘that’s not a budget,’” Helen recalls. The advisor recommended Mvelopes.com.

The couple entered a debt management program, and in three years, slashed their credit card debt from $66,000 to $10,600, paying off four of their six cards. “It required a lot of changes to our lifestyle,” says Helen. They eliminated travel, entertainment, eating out and cable television; they don’t use credit cards and have managed to save $3,500 in an emergency fund.

In addition, Bob was able to find a new job in construction, managing to survive a round of layoffs; Helen worked overtime whenever possible at her job at a hospital. “We’re hoping that in a year that we’ll have the credit card debt gone,” she says, adding that they plan to shift those payments toward their second mortgage. “After that we’d like to be able to save for a vacation.”

Helen says using Mvelopes, she was able to track medical costs that weren’t covered by insurance. She increased the amount set aside in her employer’s flexible spending account from $2,000 to $3,000, reducing her tax bill. “Mvelopes has helped me to stay in a budget and to realize that if you overspend in one category, you have to make it up somewhere else,” she says. “So if I have big car expense, or $100 in miscellaneous house repairs, I have to figure out where to spend less. Using Mvelopes has reduced my stress tremendously.”

Helen says her faith helped her overcome the financial disaster, adding she and Bob never considered filing for bankruptcy. “We were responsible for that debt and I really wanted to pay it as much as we could,” she says. “God has blessed us with great job for Bob and the ability to have overtime at my job as well, so I felt we could do it -- and we have.”