Chip & Joanna Gaines Get Candid About the Tough Times 💔 The Fixer Upper stars reveal they nearly filed for bankruptcy — “We were in trouble.”

Chip and Joanna Gaines are easily HGTV’s biggest success story, going from the 2013 airing of a pilot for what would become their hit show, “Fixer Upper,” to overseeing their own empire a dozen years later.

But the couple experienced some incredibly lean years, they shared during an October 2025 appearance on the “How I Built This Podcast” with Guy Raz, revealing that they flirted with filing for bankruptcy as they struggled to make their home flipping business profitable.

Joanna admitted, “That was a rough 3 to 4 years of just every day, we were like, ‘Is this where we do the bankruptcy thing?’”

When Joanna Gaines Closed Her Shop in 2006, She Had a ‘God Moment’ While Locking the Door for the Last Time

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Married in May 2003, the couple juggled two businesses at first. Chip was doing his best to get his home renovation business off the ground while Joanna ran a little gift and decor shop called Magnolia in Waco, Texas.

She shared on Raz’s “How I Built This” podcast that after doing the math, her goal at the shop was to make $250 a day to make ends meet for their family. But by 2006, already parents to two of their five kids, she closed up the shop to focus on being a mom and helping Chip design homes.

“I felt like I was letting go of my dream,” she admitted, “(but) it was a God moment where I was like, ‘If I let this go, is it gone forever?’ And I’ll never forget, as I was turning the key for the last time as I locked the door on the last day it was open, I felt like God said, ‘It’s gonna come back in a way bigger way because of your trust.’”

Chip & Joanna Gaines Say They Were in Financial ‘Trouble’ for Years

By letting go of Magnolia — which would eventually become their multimillion-dollar brand — and helping design the homes that Chip was flipping, Joanna said they realized they made a great team.

“For us (working) together, that’s where the magic hit,” Joanna told Raz, but that didn’t mean their house flipping business took off right away.

When the financial crisis of 2008 arrived, things looked dire. Joanna explained they had just decided to move from flipping one to two homes at a time to buying a six-acre plot of land where they’d build 38 “patio homes.”

With four kids under four and the housing market spiraling, Chip recalled, “We were in trouble … but because of our naivety, we didn’t even know you could file bankruptcies, so that wasn’t really on the table because we didn’t know anything about it.”

“Everybody was being super gracious because we weren’t the only people going through this,” he continued. “You know, we’d owe somebody $500 and we’d give ’em a hundred, and we’d owe somebody $5,000 and we’d give them a thousand. And we just kind of kept stair-stepping, making the best of these worst-case scenarios.”

“It was years of just doing this virtual bankruptcy,” Chip added. “We were always broke, we were always begging people for one more minute, one more day, one more week.”

Living in the houses they were renovating — nine houses in 10 years, packing their belongings in garbage bags — Joanna said they got “scrappy” and “creative” to make things work.

‘Fixer Upper’ Changed Everything for Chip & Joanna Gaines

By 2012, the Gaines felt like their business had finally stabilized and they’d developed a local following of people who loved to see the homes and interior design they were creating.

When a producer from HGTV called in 2013, Chip said he “thought it was a scam.” But they allowed a camera crew to come to Waco and film them working together. At the time, they didn’t even own a TV, Joanna said. Chip said he had a “phobia” of the cameras and would clam up, but they eventually found their way, and the show took off like a rocket ship in 2014.

All these years later — with an empire that includes their own Magnolia cable network, a successful magazine, a tourist destination in Waco, and a thriving product line at Target — the Gaines will star in “Fixer Upper: Mountain House,” premiering on December 9 on both Magnolia and HGTV.