"Pay the Bills, Pay the Bills"
By Keith Blackledge

Twila Martin's story is about setting goals and keeping budgets.


Omaha (Neb.) Habitat for Humanity volunteers roofing a house on an October day in 1989 might have gone on working when they saw a neighborhood parade forming. Instead, they drew up a sign and came off the roof in order to join the 24th Street parade in North Omaha.

Twila Martin was one of the spectators. She and her 4-year-old son had moved in with her mother when she couldn’t manage rent and upkeep alone. When she saw the Habitat sign, she asked a friend about it.

By June 1990, Twila had put in 350 hours of “sweat equity” and had moved into the Habitat house she had helped rehabilitate on North 24th Street. A little more than eight years later, she made the last payment on the mortgage, becoming the first Omaha HFH homeowner partner to do so.

The public celebration of that event came the next spring, in conjunction with ceremonies marking completion of Omaha HFH’s new offices in a renovated fire station. Twila received a key to the city from Omaha Mayor Hal Daub and enlivened the celebration with a performance by her high-stepping “Over The Hill Drill Team”—a marching group for adults 25 and over.

The drill team was on hand for yet another parade in 1999 when they led the march down 24th Street to Sacred Heart Church for Habitat founder and president Millard Fuller’s Habitation address celebrating Omaha HFH’s 100th home completion.

But her life wasn’t all parades and celebrations. Her paycheck at the insurance company where she worked didn’t always cover expenses. When times were tough, Twila worked with Omaha HFH’s family nurture committee to prepare budgets showing how she would make her mortgage payments. “She prepared very detailed budgets, how she would spend every cent, and she always followed through,” says Margaret Gilmore, former executive director of Omaha HFH and now an affiliate support manager for HFHI in Omaha. “She got so good at budgeting she set a goal for herself to become the first homeowner to pay off her house, and set a date to do it.”

Today, she credits a “hard-nosed husband”—whom she married five years ago—with providing the inspiration to pay off her mortgage. “[Timothy] would say, ‘Pay the bills, pay the bills. We can’t have Burger King tonight, it has to go on the bills.’” They tightened up on expenses and finally were able to accelerate their payments.

Because the house was a rehab that required comparatively little work, Twila’s mortgage was smaller than the usual Habitat mortgage in the United States—a little more than $17,000.

The two-bedroom house had belonged to an elderly woman. Ironically, Twila had visited the neighborhood frequently as a girl. “My friend and I used to walk by the house on the way to the store and I would tell her ‘I’m going to live in that house when I grow up,’” she says. “When [Habitat] told me that I had the house, I drove to the neighborhood and just felt at home.”

For Twila, moving into the house meant “no more noisy neighbors, and no more having a curfew at a grown age,” she says. “I was 30 years old and my mother said I had to be home by 10:30.”

Now, she says, “I don’t have the money of a millionaire, but I still feel like a millionaire because I try to live my life to the fullest each day.”

And in so doing, she reached some personal goals: living in the house she wished for as a girl and then paying off its mortgage.


Snapshot
Twila Martin, Omaha, Neb., U.S.A.
House description: Rehab of a single-story, two-bedroom house.
Moved in: 1990
Total amount of mortgage: $17,400
Monthly payment: $161
Paid off in: 1998


Keith Blackledge is a former newspaper editor in North Platte, Neb., and is a founding member of the board of North Platte HFH.


Reprinted from Habitat World Magazine, April/May 2001.
This article may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
©2001 Habitat for Humanity International