4 Tips to Happy Marriage in Tough Times

This shop has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and Walmart Family Mobile. All opinions are mine alone. #TreatYourFamily #CollectiveBias My life is pretty hectic most days. I work full time from home and take care of our crazy, sweet child, Zoey. Kris on the other hand is a full time student. He is in medical school, one of the most difficult and expensive degrees out there. There is an especially high divorce rate among medical students, the financial stress is extreme and the time required of medical students is unrealistic. With all this pressure we have definitely had to plan carefully to make sure we fall on the opposite side of that scale, all the way up with the most happily married couples. I think we have been quite successful so far. Keep reading and I will tell you my secret for making it through medical school and staying close as a family, here is a hint: HINT. Before I reveal the secret though, some picture of our super fun date night last night!She adores her daddy. She just woke up from her nap right before we went out and was in a really funny/bad mood. Anything we asked her she would just glare at us or give us the side eye and act super offended! I love my little drama queen. Ummmm… This phone only cost me $69.82, that is like 5 burgers at a restaurant – I would trade five burgers for an awesome smart phone any day. Side eye glare again!  Not sure what that tongue is doing but I just couldn’t leave this picture out!   After ice cream she was all hyper and kept scream-laughing and hug-biting our legs. Crazy child.  Cotton candy & cake batter…. Mmmmm.  I use my scarf as a buffer between the table and this brand new smooth LG Leon – I should probably just get a case though! 

Now that you have made it through all the pictures of our awesome night I will reward you with my secret to keeping my family close during this crazy time in our life. I have four tips but the most important is this: we take time to TREAT our family! We budget time and money for FAMILY FUN. Family is the most important thing to both Kris and I and we put the most important things first. How do we do this? The next three tips help make family time happen.

My next tip is to save a little extra money each month, identify somewhere you can cut costs and make an effort to do it. One of the places we save big time is in our phone bills. We know so many people who pay double, or even triple what we pay every month for service. With Walmart Family Mobile service is only $39.88/month (for the first line) for unlimited talk, text and up to 5GB of 4G LTE data. I just got the LG Leon LTE and it was only $69.82 at Walmart and I love it! With the extra money you save do fun family things like the date night we went on last night in the pictures above. An ice cream and burgers date is so simple, but taking the time to do it can really bring you closer together as a family.

The third tip is to take time every day to talk to your spouse and other family members. Sincerely ask them about their day, take time to say I love you even if that is the only thing you have time to say all day. Kris and I text each other all day long. Walmart Family Mobile has unlimited texting, I never worry about running out of texts. I always send picture updates of what Zoey and I are doing and Kris sends me encouraging messages and updates on last minute changes to his schedule so I stay in the loop. Some days we don’t have time to have a real conversation all day and texting each other in our spare seconds becomes the lifeline for keeping each other close.

The fourth tip is to build a support group outside of your family. For Kris this is other students that can relate to what he is going through, when he has friends over and they start talking about school I usually only understand 10% of what they are saying with all the medical gibberish, but I love seeing that he has a great group of people who understand the stress that is medical school. For me it is my sisters and my mom. I have no family nearby so we keep in touch completely through Skyping. I love texting my mom while I am out and about so my mom can see Zoey in her element, out in nature. Before I got more data I would run out of data early every month, now I never do! Walmart Family Mobile just increased their data and I love that I can Skype my family anywhere and not worry about using all my data up.

If you are plotting your next family adventure Walmart Family Mobiles Tumblr page has a ton of inspiring posts. Check it out and let me know in the comments how you plan to ‘treat your family’ and create some great memories this season and throughout the year!

Disclaimer: All prices for phones and plans included in this post are accurate as of the date of posting; however, these prices are subject to change. Please refer to this page or your local Walmart for current pricing.