Nursing School and Being Married

(Smile Darling Photography)

For those of you who are in nursing school, you know it can be extremely challenging and kind of like throwing yourselves to the wolves. Now I don't want to scare any of you who are thinking about nursing school, but it is not for the faint of heart. For those of you who are not in nursing school, it almost feels like you are in a cult because you only associate with other nursing majors and have no time for an outside life. At least, that is how it feels at times.

I turned the tables on that idea real quick because I GOT MARRIED DURING NURSING SCHOOL!

Yep, I know I'm nuts. And to make matters a bit more tricky... the hubs was/is also getting his Doctorate in Physical Therapy at the same school.
We had no idea how to go about this but we knew two things for sure. 1) we wanted to live together 2) we weren't going to live together because we both have pretty strong beliefs about that. So... we decided to get married.

You may be thinking that we are trust fund babies who have their parents pay for everything. NOPE! We have student loans, we worked hard, and we are doing it.
I am here to tell you it is totally possible.

When Cody (the hubs) and I got engaged, life was easy peasy and full of fun adventures (also known as our monthly Asheville NC trips). This was right at the start of PT school for him and I was transferring from another school to Belmont University. We had no idea how hard both of our degrees would be but we were/are so in love and we wanted nothing more than to get married. So we embarked on our new adventure of planning a wedding while dredging through the books.

I tried to plan as much as I could during winter break, spring break, and summer. We decided we needed a year engagement to make sure we didn't overwhelm ourselves too much.

During this first year of marriage, we have lived in three different homes... yes THREE!!! We lived in a basement apartment for the first 5 months, but unbeknownst to us there was a brown recluse problem. Apparently they only come out in the summer so when we got married in December we had no clue what was about to unfold. We found 14 of those suckers within a 7 day period. Come the end of May, we were out of there as fast as we could. We ended up moving in with some friends while we tried to figure out our next step. That was nice because we didn't have to pay rent!
Thankfully the spider episode happened right when school ended for summer break, so we had summer to freak about where we were going to live next. I am the type of person who has to have stability when I'm going through something as tough as nursing school. We ended up with an AMAZING apartment in downtown Nashville, TN. We have a family friend who is hooking us up!

I like to pride myself on ways we can cut corners especially when it comes to groceries. We spend about $50-$60 dollars on groceries every week while also eating paleo based foods, pay about $50 dollars in gas every 2 weeks (we have tiny cars and we live in the city), and $700 for rent. While I don't coupon I think that it would help with groceries even more. I just honestly don't have the time to keep up with it.
My parents agreed to help us out by paying for my car insurance and my phone bill while we are still in school. His mom pays for his phone bill, as well as his car insurance. We both have student loans from our degrees. I am going to do a full break down of loans in a later post... just know the number of almost 200K will be brought up. Since I am currently in my last semester of nursing school, we agreed that I wouldn't work. There are a lot of moving parts with three different clincals and my course load that working wouldn't be very realistic for me right now, so we ended up taking out a bit extra in student loans to get us get through this semester.

I am suppose to graduate in May of this year (2019) yay!! The hubs is going graduate in August with this Doctorate. By the time we will both we graduated we will have been married for over a year and a half. We both attend Belmont University here in Nashville, TN.

Yes... I am that tired looking, but hey, I'm in love, married, and about to graduate from college with one of the best undergrads you can possibly think of!
Being married and going to college is not that popular of an opinion but if it is something you want and feel that you can work hard and put your spouse first, you can totally do it. Too many people told us that we are too young, should focus on our studies, or should just wait until we graduate.
We didn't let others influence our decison and boy am I glad we didn't. I could honestly say I couldn't have gotten this far without his help. He has been my rock, my study partner, my outlet when life got too hard and just my person. If you need some advice from someone on the other side of the fence please reach out to me! I would love to help you through it.