Cleaning up the jobless aftermath

I know I'm posting a shit load more than usual, and I know that leads to a downturn in readership, but shit, I got a job! And I have a lot to process.

The breakdown came yesterday. It’s quite a different feeling to have all these stresses and weights on your shoulders for months and months.

First, an interesting tidbit about credit cards. When you decide to stop paying them, you get a lot of phone calls. Luckily, we live in an age where our phones tell us what area code a call is coming from, and you can just ignore them. But it was getting to be about 12 calls a day to ignore.

I wish I could have picked up, to say, yes, I’ll send you a payment straght away. However, I learned early on that when they say “We want to work with you,” that means, “Pay us the full amount you owe us now.”  Don’t have a job, or money? Too bad, pay us.

(warning, video has strong language)

The crazy thing is after a few months, you start getting really ridiculous offers. At one point, they said I could pay off the whole 20,000 on the card with just 11,000 in four easy payments. You got to wonder, what the hell do they think I’m not paying for? Because I’m secretly stashing 11,000?  But it occurs to me that if you don’t give a shit about your credit score and you want to simply cut out a lot of debt, stop paying for a while and see what happens.

I have a bankers box full of recent bills, paystubs, late payments, tax returns, house information. It’s about 10 pounds worth of documents I used to fill out the lawyers form for bankruptcy. It’s been sitting there, waiting for me to have enough money to move ahead with it. Then I sold the house and got hired. So all that was left was about 30k in credit card debt.

And with the new job, I have the ability to make things right. I was more than willing to do bankruptcy and take a dump on my credit rating. I don’t want to buy a house again for a long time, and used cars are the only option I’ve ever thought would be available to me. Renting if we ever decided to move would be difficult, but we are settled with no plans to move for another four years anyway. Moving sucks balls.

On Wednesday, I called ACCC, a nonprofit debt relief company to see if I could get on a debt management program. They set me up to start at 770 a month for nearly five years to get out of it, which was less than I imagined. If I were to continue paying the minimum payment on these cards, it would cost me 1000 a month and take 25 years and about 17000 more in interest. They asked me to call each of the five cards to close the accounts.

OnThursday, I called each card. The big one, the 20000 one, gave me an offer to pay off directly to them, 270 a month for 60 months. They would forgive the interest, so the total cost would be 16000, with 0 percent interest locked in for those 60 months. I called ACCC back and they were like, shit, yeah, take that deal. So now between the two, it will be 550 a month to fully pay off my debts. Half of that for 4 years, the other half for 5. And I’ll be out.

Not to mention we can start paying back the family debts that accrued just so we could eat PB and J sandwiches and fill the car.

And after all that, I started putting the papers I’d pulled out of the box back in. All the credit bills, all the paperwork, the 10 pounds of paper that has felt like 2,000. And my body began to shake, and my face clenched in tearless sobs. And I can breathe.