Welcome everyone. This is episode five of a new Wineb podcast series,

debt stories, real people beating debt and winning financially. Today we'll meet Brittany who lives with her husband Keith and

their young daughters first-grader Amelia and preschooler Charlotte in Marietta,

Georgia a suburb just outside of Atlanta.

Between student loans, a mortgage and credit cards, Brittany and Keith were in debt to the tune of $263,000.

A number that used to keep Brittany awake at night.

And that was before she left her full-time job, and Keith was laid off.

He worked for CSX for the railroad.

He's a dispatcher, which is kind of like an air traffic controller but for train so he's worked for

CSX for nine years for the last several years he's actually been an electrical

trainer and sort of the manager of the trainers essentially or it was very recently CSX has gone through massive

layoff and he unfortunately was part of those waves of layoff incredibly

fortunately we have continued to pay his union dues in the time

that he has been working as a manager so for almost five years so when he

got laid off it was incredibly easy for him and had a one week like enforced vacation and then went back to

dispatching. Just months before Keith lost his job Brittany underwent a huge shift in her career too.

In February of this year, coincidentally, about a month before the layoffs at CSX started happening,

I quit my well-paying government full-time job with pension and benefits and salary and all

you know paid time off to start freelancing because I was miserable.

So I'm a freelance marketing manager slash consultant slash

whatever sort of project work I want to take up. So how do they wind up with so much

debt in the first place? Like with so many other people, it happened bit by bit.

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