Silver Lining
Just one year ago, we celebrated the near-dismissal of all our credit card debt. We were careful for so long, waiting for tax returns when we could give the companies and their ostentatious fees the ole heave-ho when we paid them off and cut up their little plastic demons.
Then my funding at WSU ended.
See, we have been playing a dangerous game for years now, eking out a living on the backs of student loans, borrowing against my future income. That worked for a long time, but the funding ran out before I graduated, and we still had two years to go. Sooooo...we opened up the credit cards again to buy groceries, gas, pay ballet bills for the kids, and even float the utilities along. If I were a finance major, I am sure I would have imploded inside. Luckily I am an anthropology major.
Then the "living on credit cards" thing worked for awhile too, until the monthly payments rivaled our food bill or our house payment, and all the cards were maxed out. Sadly we have little by way of concrete goods to show for it, excepting the laptop we had to replace for my schoolwork, to the tune of Best Buy's 21% APR. The rest went into bellies and kept the lights on.
Now, we are at a point where we cannot even pay our credit card bills at all, so we have been scrambling around to devise a new plan, a better plan, a save-our-asses-before-we-get-sued-plan. The first thing we did was stop paying the credit card bills, which really mystifies the companies after our 5 or more years of good dealings and timely payments with most of them. They call, sometimes multiple times in one day, to tell me I have a bill, and then proceed to ask me to pay it. Most of the time I am nice, simply telling them we will have more money once we figure this all out, so why not let a momma chill and not call her 8 times a day? Other times they start yelling and being all derogatory and I just hang up on them. Asshats.
The second part of our plan involved casting our net into the world of private educational loans, where we could borrow up to THIRTY! THOUSAND! DOLLARS! for expenses related to school, in this case, room and board related for us. This got me really excited...I figured I would get a loan, pay off all the effing credit companies, and rebuild our credit with a good loan we would pay off each month, with no more fees being racked up (close to $100 a month for nearly every card we can't make a payment on including late fees and over the limit fees as they keep tacking it on to the account....and we have close to ten credit cards).
Then they told us we needed a co-signer. Slumping, I called my mother in defeat, explaining we were screwed and without a paddle and all that. She tried her best, both her and my dad, but since they are retired and taking care of my grandfather (and living with him to do this, meaning they gave up their house) the banks all said nope, bringing us back to square one. We already got our lights turned back on by my husband's mother and her husband, who both gave us a loan to pay the electric bill after it got shut off (and we had to run a cord across two houses to a neighbors to have one light in the living room and cook dinner in our firepit, ha!...but I digress and that is another story), so we can't ask them. Being only children...well...ya, not brothers and sisters who might actually have a savings or own their own homes and be able to cosign. Totally screwed.
So we hatch Plan C, which involved registering my husband for classes at WSU, because he can take out student loans! This will work rather well, and will not only cover the missing chunk my dropped funding left out for my tuition, it will give us some money to live on for a little while longer, so I can get through the last three quarters of my undergrad and graduate, moving me into graduate school and graduate school funding.....more loans! More debt! OMG are we effing insane?! Yes! But we are alive! And with food and shelter!
But wait...it gets better. I received a letter offering me a Home Depot card, which I tossed aside to the back of the desk, laughing because we are already in dept up to our eyeballs so I couldn't imagine why a company would offer me credit at all. Then the washing machine broke.
We do approximately three loads of laundry a day, more if cloth diapers need to be washed or someone pees the bed. I have gone to the laundry mat before, and to do enough laundry for three days of our normal washing, I would spend 120$, so by the time the week was done, I would have shelled out as much as it costs to buy a washer. We looked at each other, then looked at the letter, and nodded solemnly.
Would you believe they extended the credit to us? I am shocked as much as I am relieved. I mean...it is plainly obvious that we are drowning in credit cards we have lived on...are they really that kind? Then I flipped over the letter to read the 24% APR. Ahhhhhhh, now I get it. New washing machine arrives hopefully tomorrow, they had to special order the inexpensive energy efficent one I picked out, since all the other po' people had bought the stock while they were on sale.
On the bright side, we will be able to wash clothes. On the icky, dark, smelly, slimy side...we have plunged one more nail into our credit coffin and I have the sinking feeling it will take upwards of 20 years to recover.
Good thing I have a sense of humor, eh?
It helps that we haven't been treated like credit lepers by our friends and family for the most part. My mom sends me coupons, and she is coming this fall to watch the kids so I can get a job while going to school. My husband's mom has offered to watch them as well. AND...someone I know from the online game I was doing research on, all the way in Canada, sent us two huge boxes of food...rice, pasta, sauce, cookies...even toothbrushes and soap! I was just....flabberghasted. Marc...wherever you are right now...thank you so much for that. ^__^
Our neighbors even banded together and shoved us out for a night on our own to eat dinner, even all chipping in to give us the money for our food and drinks, on top of watching all five of our little monkeys so we could go. In the process, they helped our marriage to not crumble under the personal and financial strain it was being crushed by.
Mere footnotes in our lives....but all of it, every last bit of it, bolsters my faith in the good we can do as human beings, regardless of the economic leeches we have let credit companies become or how little American society supports working families. All the little acts of kindness made me realize that all of us down here on the bottom, huddling together while the bigwigs trade bits of our lives away and make money off of people being poor.....we are stronger than them through our ability to have compassion and take care of our own.
Thank you, each and every one of you, for not letting that faith die inside me. Without it, I am toast, and I know it.
X-posted to my blog on myspace coz I am too damn lazy to write something this long for over there too.
Then my funding at WSU ended.
See, we have been playing a dangerous game for years now, eking out a living on the backs of student loans, borrowing against my future income. That worked for a long time, but the funding ran out before I graduated, and we still had two years to go. Sooooo...we opened up the credit cards again to buy groceries, gas, pay ballet bills for the kids, and even float the utilities along. If I were a finance major, I am sure I would have imploded inside. Luckily I am an anthropology major.
Then the "living on credit cards" thing worked for awhile too, until the monthly payments rivaled our food bill or our house payment, and all the cards were maxed out. Sadly we have little by way of concrete goods to show for it, excepting the laptop we had to replace for my schoolwork, to the tune of Best Buy's 21% APR. The rest went into bellies and kept the lights on.
Now, we are at a point where we cannot even pay our credit card bills at all, so we have been scrambling around to devise a new plan, a better plan, a save-our-asses-before-we-get-sued-plan. The first thing we did was stop paying the credit card bills, which really mystifies the companies after our 5 or more years of good dealings and timely payments with most of them. They call, sometimes multiple times in one day, to tell me I have a bill, and then proceed to ask me to pay it. Most of the time I am nice, simply telling them we will have more money once we figure this all out, so why not let a momma chill and not call her 8 times a day? Other times they start yelling and being all derogatory and I just hang up on them. Asshats.
The second part of our plan involved casting our net into the world of private educational loans, where we could borrow up to THIRTY! THOUSAND! DOLLARS! for expenses related to school, in this case, room and board related for us. This got me really excited...I figured I would get a loan, pay off all the effing credit companies, and rebuild our credit with a good loan we would pay off each month, with no more fees being racked up (close to $100 a month for nearly every card we can't make a payment on including late fees and over the limit fees as they keep tacking it on to the account....and we have close to ten credit cards).
Then they told us we needed a co-signer. Slumping, I called my mother in defeat, explaining we were screwed and without a paddle and all that. She tried her best, both her and my dad, but since they are retired and taking care of my grandfather (and living with him to do this, meaning they gave up their house) the banks all said nope, bringing us back to square one. We already got our lights turned back on by my husband's mother and her husband, who both gave us a loan to pay the electric bill after it got shut off (and we had to run a cord across two houses to a neighbors to have one light in the living room and cook dinner in our firepit, ha!...but I digress and that is another story), so we can't ask them. Being only children...well...ya, not brothers and sisters who might actually have a savings or own their own homes and be able to cosign. Totally screwed.
So we hatch Plan C, which involved registering my husband for classes at WSU, because he can take out student loans! This will work rather well, and will not only cover the missing chunk my dropped funding left out for my tuition, it will give us some money to live on for a little while longer, so I can get through the last three quarters of my undergrad and graduate, moving me into graduate school and graduate school funding.....more loans! More debt! OMG are we effing insane?! Yes! But we are alive! And with food and shelter!
But wait...it gets better. I received a letter offering me a Home Depot card, which I tossed aside to the back of the desk, laughing because we are already in dept up to our eyeballs so I couldn't imagine why a company would offer me credit at all. Then the washing machine broke.
We do approximately three loads of laundry a day, more if cloth diapers need to be washed or someone pees the bed. I have gone to the laundry mat before, and to do enough laundry for three days of our normal washing, I would spend 120$, so by the time the week was done, I would have shelled out as much as it costs to buy a washer. We looked at each other, then looked at the letter, and nodded solemnly.
Would you believe they extended the credit to us? I am shocked as much as I am relieved. I mean...it is plainly obvious that we are drowning in credit cards we have lived on...are they really that kind? Then I flipped over the letter to read the 24% APR. Ahhhhhhh, now I get it. New washing machine arrives hopefully tomorrow, they had to special order the inexpensive energy efficent one I picked out, since all the other po' people had bought the stock while they were on sale.
On the bright side, we will be able to wash clothes. On the icky, dark, smelly, slimy side...we have plunged one more nail into our credit coffin and I have the sinking feeling it will take upwards of 20 years to recover.
Good thing I have a sense of humor, eh?
It helps that we haven't been treated like credit lepers by our friends and family for the most part. My mom sends me coupons, and she is coming this fall to watch the kids so I can get a job while going to school. My husband's mom has offered to watch them as well. AND...someone I know from the online game I was doing research on, all the way in Canada, sent us two huge boxes of food...rice, pasta, sauce, cookies...even toothbrushes and soap! I was just....flabberghasted. Marc...wherever you are right now...thank you so much for that. ^__^
Our neighbors even banded together and shoved us out for a night on our own to eat dinner, even all chipping in to give us the money for our food and drinks, on top of watching all five of our little monkeys so we could go. In the process, they helped our marriage to not crumble under the personal and financial strain it was being crushed by.
Mere footnotes in our lives....but all of it, every last bit of it, bolsters my faith in the good we can do as human beings, regardless of the economic leeches we have let credit companies become or how little American society supports working families. All the little acts of kindness made me realize that all of us down here on the bottom, huddling together while the bigwigs trade bits of our lives away and make money off of people being poor.....we are stronger than them through our ability to have compassion and take care of our own.
Thank you, each and every one of you, for not letting that faith die inside me. Without it, I am toast, and I know it.
X-posted to my blog on myspace coz I am too damn lazy to write something this long for over there too.