Why Strike Debt

I’m 27 years old.  For as long as I could remember, I was told that college was the path to success, the ONLY path to success.  When I was in high school I began to question this and explore other options, but I was shamed and guilt tripped by my family until I agreed to go to college.

I flunked out of one college and tried another.  And another.  And another.  I have been enrolled in 4 different colleges.  Every time I signed another FAFSA form, every time I filled out another class schedule, every time I moved my stuff into another dorm room, I knew, deep down, in my heart, in my blood cells, that this was wrong for me.

College was wrong for me in the same way that a woman is wrong for a gay man.  College was wrong for me in the same way a fish tank is the wrong environment for an elephant.  It’s nothing personal, colleges are nice enough places with a lot of really great people, but it was deeply incompatible with who I am.  I spent years stuffing down who I really am.

Now I know.  I actually found my calling - it’s direct action, public service, weirdo do-gooding.  I’ve never been happier or more fulfilled in my entire life.  But my “career” doesn’t really earn any money.  I accept donations, I have a pay pal button.  And that’s enough.

One of my student loan providers has begun calling my family members (and one family friend) to try and track me down.  I don’t have a mailing address anymore.  I returned their phone call and told them, politely, that as I now believe education to be a fundamental human right, like food, water, shelter, and healthcare, I do not recognize my debts as legitimate and I have no plans to pay them.

I don’t imagine this will go over well with my family.  I am not happy about the idea of them receiving more phone calls, but I’m not going to pay $4000 or $6000 or $10,000 just to end the phone calls.  I could do much better things with that kind of money, if I had it.  Whatever money I do get, I use to feed people and spread kindness.

I submitted my story on March 15th. Here is the response from the VP of Operations who is listed in the bioethics brochure as the head of the Bioethics Comittee. I know I shouldn’t take it personally, I know it is about profit and institutional protection. But the thing is, I do take it personally.

Dear Ms. Lewis”

I would like to thank you for your correspondence dated March 6,2013. All appropriate parties at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital have read the letter. At this time the Chariman of the Bioethics Committee has determined your concerns with pricing are not an appropriate topic for this Committee to review. ( note: Okay, if he is listed on the brochure as head of the committee, is this not a bit like Oz behind the curtain? Also, says they’ll get back within 48 hrs. They did not.)

Here is the part that hurts. It is as if I am lying when I say that I was told I could self pay $1,500. 

Extensive call logs are kept within our price estimate department. Unfortunately, we have no record of you obtaining a price quote with that service. If you would like, you may apply for financial assistance by calling Amanda Burpee at (603)740-3234 or Christina Meehan at (603) 740-3342. I have attached an application for your convenience.

Sincerely, Daniel Dunn, Senior VP of Operations FACHE

Wentworth Douglass Hospital, Dover, New Hampshire.

I guess it is akin to living in New York (my hometown) and seeing a homeless person on your corner every morning. At first you give them money, worry. Then, they become invisible, the reviled, “Other.”

In  a good mood I am grateful to be alive, grateful to have had treatment. In a bad mood the weight of the debt and the gouging is almost unbearable. 

This is a letter I sent to the CEO of my local hospital. I had asked ror an ethics inquiry, as I think gouging is an ethical issue. No response. Then I copied this letter to the head of the bioethics comittee, my oncologists, the social worker, the financial aid people, a lawyer, Carl Elliot, a pioneering bioethicist at University of Minnesota (who I did correspond with), Jeffrey Young, a journalist for Huffpo Biz who wrote an article about my being turned down by my insurance company for a pre-existing condition, and Chris Hayes at Up. Nobody has responded. I feel it is unethical to gouge a self pay patient. My life would be different without the medical debt in that I would proceed with follow up care. I have tried, but failed, as this letter illustrates. We need Single Payer. Anything less is criminal.

Thanks,

Sarah Lewis

March 6, 2013

 

Sarah Lewis

59 Silver Street

Dover, NH 03820

 

Mr. Gregory Walker

President and CEO

Wentworth Douglass Hospital

789 Central Avenue

Dover, NH 03820

 

 

Dear Mr. Walker:

 

I am very grateful for the treatment I received from my wonderful oncologists (Ortiz/Metcalf), and everyone on The Seacoast Cancer Center staff.  But here is the thing, I am too tired to fight being gouged on a CT scan that is priced way over what I had been told it would be as a self-pay patient.  I talked to someone named Sue who led me to believe it would be affordable. I naively tried to pay by check before going in for the scan. Nope.  Can’t do that when mystery billing is on the agenda.

 

My friends and family were pleased that I was following up, having a scan. Dr. Ortiz said it was important to come regularly, that he’d perhaps be able to treat something we notice before it has spread. But I had put it off due to finances. I felt so grateful that I could pay a reasonable rate as an uninsured cancer patient. So, forgive me if after spending my initial treatment in the autumn of 2010 fighting Assurant Health who denied my claims based upon a pre-existing condition, (and racking up $16,000 in fees to WDH now in collections) for having no energy left.  It is profiting from the sick. It is shameful. I asked for a bioethics consult because it seems to me an ethical matter. It isn’t about the bill, the bills are conjured from thin air. (See: Discrepancy in Medicare and Private Insurance billing, discounts for big insurance companies).

 

Today we picked up birth control pills for my daughter at Rite Aid. Lo and behold there was no charge. A public health initiative.  I am my only public health initiative—my own advocate.  But I am weary to the bone, and I feel abandoned and gouged. I don’t have $9,000. I do have $1,500 if that is acceptable.

 

Thank you.

 

I always paid my debts.  Before I decided to go to college, I consolidated all my credit card debts into a personal loan my father helped me get and paid it off in one year.  I was debt free, for a while.  My father paid for my undergraduate degree and for the first year of my master’s program.  Then I was on my own.  That was okay, though, because by then I had been filing my own tax returns and was financially independent, so I qualified for financial aid.  I also worked for the college as a Graduate Assistant and that got me a monthly stipend and tuition waiver.  I lived a frugal life throughout my graduate programs.  I ate mostly rice, popcorn, spaghetti, bread, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Meat was off the menu since it is more expensive than bananas, apples and broccoli.  I was pretty thin all through college.  I was really happy, though, because I loved learning, I loved teaching, and I believed that what I was doing was good for our communities, our society.  Progress and innovation comes on the heels of a good education, after all.  I was part of the “good education” team to help our next generation innovate and create the next great gadget.

As I said, I lived frugally, but I still had to use credit cards to make ends meet.  I did have to buy clothes once in a while.  I needed a haircut sometimes, too—although, I admit to just cutting the split ends with my office scissors most of the time.  And yes, sometimes, I just splurged and bought myself something I probably shouldn’t have, like the electric piano so I could get back to playing in my spare time.  Oh well, at least I finally learned to play “Moonlight Sonata”—that must be good for something.

After a few years of graduate work, though, I stopped getting free financial aid—I maxed out and had to resort to student loans through the government.  When I finally finished my Ph.D., I had about $98,000 in student loan debts and about $3,000 in credit card debts.  I did not think this was too unreasonable because I anticipated getting a good job in academia doing what I loved, teaching, and making a decent income that would allow me to pay off my debt in 3 to 4 years—I planned on living as frugally as I had been to pay it off.  I knew that if I made $50,000 a year, I could live off of $30,000 and use the rest to pay my debt.  No problem because, as a graduate student, I was use to living off of $15,000 a year.

Then came the first recession.  Yes folks, this recession did not just start 5 years ago.  It started more like 20 years ago.  Most people did not notice what was happening because those of us in academia live in some weird kind of other dimension from the rest of the nation.  However, this is what has been happening to your public school system starting with kindergarten and going all the way to university.  You see, public education is a huge drain on the government and many people do not like to pay for someone else’s education.  So, budget cuts to public education ensued.  Mostly, higher education was left untouched for a while, but then the hammer hit.  When the first wave of budget cuts came, the university turned to its graduate students to fill those classrooms, both as students and as low wage teachers.  When the administrators saw how much that helped their budgets, they started highering more and more part-time teachers and fewer and fewer full-time teachers.  When a department would lose three full-timers to retirement or relocation, they would only be allowed to higher one full-timer and then 4 to 6 part-timers would be highered to fill in the rest.  This is the workforce I became part of.  My big dream of getting out of debt was, initially, put off until I could land that dream full-time gig, which I believed I would get in no more than 5 years, tops.  Afterall, I had jumped through every hoop; I was published, I had a research agenda, I did postdoc work at a super respectable private university, I even taught over seas.  What didn’t I do to pad my resume?

Fast forward 10 years.  I’m still teaching part-time.  I have no benefits, my $98,000 student loan is now $101,000. and my credit card debt is at $35,000.  I have no savings, my retirement, after working 10 years as a teacher in higher education is at about $17,000.  I pay for my own medical insurance, I drive a 20 year old car because I can’t afford the monthly payments on a new car, or the insurance, or the registration that accompany a new car.

I also have two kids.  Even though my plans for paying off my debt failed, I would not allow debt to control all my life decisions.  So, I willing brought kids into my life, knowing full well that it would only worsen my fiscal problems.  My husband and I divorced a few years ago, and I think our mounting debt and the stress it caused us is partly or mostly to blame for our failed marriage.  We have no money for their future college education and I know that, as of today, if my employment situation does not change, I will not be able to help them with tuition.  They will be forced to get financial aid and then student loans when the free aid runs out, which it will.  They will have to depend on credit cards to make ends meet.  They will have debt in the amount of $50,000 or more by the time they are 24 years young.

I refuse to allow my kids to fall prey to this broken and destructive monetary system we are living in.  We have decided to leave the U.S., and even abandon some of our debt in order to allow our children and ourselves to live a good life, a life without the burden and enslavement of debt.  We never wanted to be rich.  I never imagined myself in a big house with a big yard and all new appliances, granite counters, tile floors, etc.  I am still frugal and modest in my lifestyle, but even a frugal life style seems to be out of reach for us.  This is not the kind of world I want my kids to live in.  It must change.  I leave you all with a stanza from William Butler Yeats’ poem The Second Coming.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Economic struggle has been a near constant presence in my life. Medical expenses began problems. I became responsible for paying for a brain surgery (thanks to my hydrocephalus diagnosis at 18 months old), which was performed when I was a minor, after my mother chose not to pay.

Subsequent treatment and surgeries during college for me to take out more student loans than planned. So, I’m still faced with a large student loan balance, made up of, mostly, medical bills.

My chosen field as a journalist hasn’t allowed for much expendable income. So, dealing with debt remained a problem. However, I began diligently working on it once my partner and I decided to buy a house.

My attempt at continuing to work on getting rid of debt were dashed when I lost my job. I’ve been unemployed for more than a year, which was exacerbated by my eventual breakup. The breakup included being illegally removed from the home, loss of my car and ending up in a homeless shelter.

My former partner allowed me to return to our home, but became violent. He had me evicted (after coercing me to sign a quit claim deed) in retaliation of his domestic violence arrest. I also became ineligible unemployment benefits after exhausting my federal benefit allotment.

I’m now living in an efficiency paid for with a domestic violence grant, receiving food stamps and have applied for a meager township grant, while I look for freelance writing work. Securing a job in the rural town (Freeport, Ill.), in which I live, is nearly impossible.

If I could be debt, I would, after paying for necessities, find a way to help community organizations and use travel as way of helping people in other countries.

Followed all the “growing up rules”:

Stay out of trouble; go to college;  get a job, and one day you’ll retire and get a gold watch.

I even went one better:  I went into the military. 

I have student debt from an ivy league school, plus graduate school that I’ll never be able to pay off.  I am scraping by in the midwest, working 2-3 jobs at a time, which is putting me into bigger and bigger tax troubles. There are no good jobs here.  The good jobs go to the same few people who keep hiring each other.  Applying for jobs on the internet is a joke… where are all of these submissions going? And the icing on the cake is, companies are not hiring people who have a load of debt.  Unbelievable.  It’s unfortunate to say, but I could have been a bum or a middle school dropout and still ended up where I am now.  The only good news I can think of, is I own nothing, so no foreclosures.

As a veteran, I do get a flag for my coffin.  Wonder if they’ll put a lien on it?

I recently donated my status to strike debt because I have a theatre degree that at the end of my studies costs me $101,000 dollars. It hangs over my head and causes me not to be able to get a job, not to be able to have good credit and not to be able to be in a position where I can have success rather than failure in life. I’m constantly trying to figure out a way out of it, and short of becoming permanently disabled, I most likely will have this debt for the rest of my life. I would like to have my debts erased because I believe that our government should be bailing out the American people, and not the bankers and businesses who are creating the problem in the first place. Give us a non-monetary way to pay for school if the economy is so damn important. Give us a Works Project Administration way to pay it off. Give us a way we can make a voice for everyone. Last time I looked, we vote people into office, but because we don’t have the time to lobby the government, we are put in the poorhouse by people who buy and sell our debt. It’s a shame. I hate it. I don’t believe that they should get away with it. I support what you are doing, this has been more of a rant than a story, but there you go. 

There is dirty little secret about making donations to charity: it’s fun.

 

On December 8, 2012 thirty nine friends from all corners of Los Angeles got together in Redondo Beach to celebrate their awareness of this secret.  The cast of characters was a rag-tag assembly of twenty-somethings of comfortable yet humble means but eager and willing charitable instincts.  Everyone chipped in $10 at the door as well as a unique gift to be sold back to the guests during the live auction part of the evening – all in the name of good fun and good intentions.

 

Although even more importantly than the gag gifts and Hamiltons, everyone was also asked to come ready to make a public address in support of their favorite charity.  Because unlike your parent’s charity events, the guests at this party would choose the recipient of their donations by voting on it, together, after the party is underway.  Eleven brave souls came up to the “podium” (read: 3 inch brick base of the fireplace) and made remarkably well researched and equally remarkably emotional monologues about the causes, people, and organizations that work to improve our world.

 

Although only one would be selected, those 11 organizations were:

I.A.V.A. (supports American veterans of Iraq & Afghanistan)

Special Olympics (supports athletes with intellectual disabilities)

Rolling Jubilee (purchases and forgives medical debt)

Urban Compass (supports after school programs for at risk youth)

Sex & Money (supports efforts to end sex trafficking)

Dan Marino Foundation (supports autism research)

Charlize Theron Africa Outreach (supports women’s empowerment)

Good Shepherd Shelter (supports victims/families of domestic abuse)

C.A.S.A. (supports volunteer advocacy for abused children)

Fair Trade LA (supports the promotion of fair trade in Los Angeles)

Complete Cambodia (supports land mine removal in SE Asia)

 

After wonderful speeches of support, soul searching, and two rounds of voting; the revelers/donors chose to support Rolling Jubilee.  Although there are likely countless organizations worthy of support, it gave the members of the “One Great Night” party great pride to send their support to the men and women of Rolling Jubilee to continue their work of erasing medical debt to improve both our financial system and the everyday lives of those fellow citizens battling with this burden.

 

Keep up the good work, Rolling Jubilee.

 

Sincerely – The Crew from One Great Night

I don’t know where to turn at this point. I am able (right now) to pay my bills, but there seems no way I’ll ever dig myself out of the hole my debt has left me in. Medical expenses, student loans and poor financial decision making years ago have left me adrift.

I take heart in the knowledge that I’m not the only one and there are others who are in worse circumstances than I. Not only that, but I am grateful that folks like you are out in the world trying to help people who find themselves buried in debt. I look forward to a time, someday, when I might be able to help. 

A year after college I decided to get my Masters in London. I thought I had deferred all my loans, but when I returned to New York, I discovered that the paperwork hadn’t cleared, and in the intervening two years I had defaulted on $30,000 worth of debt. Suddenly I had all these insurmountable barriers. I couldn’t apply to PhD programs even though I was the top student in my class. I couldn’t even get a lease for an apartment. It seemed hopeless, like I was already being punished for a mistake I hadn’t understood I was making. So, completely overwhelmed, I just stopped paying all my debts. Eight years later, I have learned to live pretty much off the grid. I have projects I work on that I’m proud of, an overall my life is OK, but I wish I could apply to a PhD program and pursue my actual talents.

I played it safe by going to a community college my first two years of college. After attending an out-of-state college for 3 semesters, I racked up nearly $30,000 in student loans, and transferring to a more ‘affordable’ university I graduated with $40,000. While this doesn’t seem like much, interest has been accruing and I have not been able to find a full time job in my field or any field for that matter.

I have tried to make payment arrangements for my loans, and have been wholly successful, but I was not informed that one of my loans would not fall under this repayment plan and I now have a loan in default. Almost all are more than 18 days past due. I live at home with my parents and I work a part time job with less than 20 hours a week 

I want to be able to work and pay my debt, but the current system is making me feel like I’m in a deep hole that I will never get out of. 

It didn’t take very long for me to realize that credit cards are a bad thing and that the only way to end the payments is to stop using the card and keep paying them off. But in college they give out credit card applications out like candy. Seriously. Here’s a free Tshirt if you fill this out.  And sure I made mistakes and in 2009 I finally payed off my credit cards by working hard, living frugally and sending double payments every month.  And here is what I mean by frugal: no cable, just internet and netflix instant play. No new clothes, just Goodwill. Dinner out? Only once a week or less, cooking from scratch the rest of the time. Decreasing how much I spend on disposables, using cloth diapers. Buying in bulk, using powdered milk, bartering with organic farmers for fresh produce. Paying for a weekly subscription to an organic farm for a year’s worth of food with my tax return, breastfeeding my two children for their first year. Up-cycling old things, like making a purse from an old worn out pair of jeans, crocheting rag rugs. I drive a 12 year old Saturn that has been payed off for a very long time. Christmas gifts have been about 75% home made for the past 4 years. Don’t be afraid of inconveniences, do the extra work to avoid the expense, conveniences are seldom worth it. Here’s my motto: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” 

But I realize I’m the exception to the rule, and that many of those options I had would not have been possible without a supportive family. I don’t actually believe in “the devil” but when ever anyone in a store tries to offer me a credit card I say, “NO, credit cards are the work of the devil.” And every time I get a smile.  And here is one last quote for you to ponder “The best things in life aren’t things.” 

When I graduated High School and first attempted to go to college I had no debt, no credit cards and I would not have any student loans for quite a few years.  The reason being that I was inedible for student loans.  My mother filed zero on her tax return and though she was my legal guardian she had no role in financially supporting me.  This meant that the U.S. Government rejected my request for student loans until I was 25.  I paid for my first semester in cash, my second with credit card and then I dropped out.

For a few years, I managed fast food restaurants and began to accrue a revolving debt, occasionally charging off one credit card with another.  I still wanted to return to college and I made plans to move to New Orleans for college in 2005, then again in 2006.  

One of my first jobs in New Orleans was at a major record store, the now defunct Tower Records, I sold music and movies and 4-6 hours a week I was the rental collections agent.  I called people and listened and bargained and charged people for rental fees up to the price of purchasing the videos outright.  I found that I judged the people as lazy, or shifty, and thought nothing of charging a person if they avoided contact.  In fact, if they tried to avoid me and I could charge their credit card I thought of it as a coup.  Though I only briefly held the position (only five months) I identified myself as the collector, it temporarily became a part of how I saw myself.  

It would be 6 years before I went back to college, with no savings, a car note and a 401(k) that I cannibalized to keep creditors at bay.  I was doing fairly well, considering.  As I went to school, I ignored the student loan debt I was amassing. I saw it as an expense I should be more than capable of handling when I was a professional.  I graduated with approximately $40,000 in student loan debt, perhaps below the national average, and approximately $10,000 in credit card debt.

This is when I discovered that I would not become a professional in my field but would continue to work in retail and live in a system of revolving debt.  I began to worry what all the debt I had taken on could do to me and to my future.  Worse than all the worry, I identified myself as a debtor, it became a part of how I saw myself.

Through the realization that came with knowing that the debt was not going away came the eventual acceptance of the situation.  I began to be able to see it as a situation which was out of my control and through that acceptance I was able to consider it separate from myself.  I am a human being, I am not a debtor as I saw myself.  I am not the situation that I am in or a byproduct of that situation but a human being.  All the people who I hounded as a collections agent were people too, just like all the collections agents who I talk to on the phone regularly are people before they are anything else.  I enjoy the discussions I have now with the people who call me, I tell them my story and I thank them for their call.  I assume that they themselves are likely in debt as well.

All my life, I was told, “You can’t succeed without an education” and “knowledge is power”. I aimed to be smart about it from the start, and avoid debt. I got every scholarship I could, and ended going to a Private University with only a small amount out of pocket as part of my initial plan.

4 years went by, and due to various circumstances, I needed a fifth year. It was only one year, so the debt didn’t seem that big of an issue, hypothetically, with what the computer programminf field paid, I’d be out of debt in a a year and a half at the most.

I graduated, and almost upon leaving, the financial crisis made its first hit. No one was hiring, everyone was firing. The stock market was plummeting. I managed to get a few jobs to make ends meet, but not in my field. Small rinky-dink jobs that barely beat minimum wage. To help out, I also started doing freelance in computers to help. I made regular payments on my debts (or so I thought, more on that soon!)

Realizing the financial crisis wasn’t going to end soon, I hit on what I thought was a brilliant idea… go back to school and wait it out. I wanted to eventually get my PhD anyway, and PhDs made a LOT of money, so I could pay off that debt when I got out, or so I thought…

Running mainly on school loans, I entered into KU, University of Kansas, and told them what I wanted to pursue as for a PhD. They told me that to enter that PhD program, I’d have to get some prerequisite classes before I’d be able to start the program itself… my undergrad wasn’t enough. So I took the classes they told me to, and tried to get in the next semester…
Ooops, they told me, you still need a series of classes… but you should be able to get it in a year of schooling, it’s not that much…
Well, I figured I was in too deep to back out, so I kept trudging forward.
I finished more classes, and went to my academic advisors, “Oh” they said, “We misunderstood you earlier on. The field you’re wanting is actually in a different department.” So I had to go to the different department and try again. By this point, I was in the third year at KU, and the school bills were racking up.
I was working hard, and then I went to the financial aide office, because I got some weird letters… it turned out I was no longer getting financial aide… the reason being? They limit it based on number of semesters, and taking a *single* winter-term class counted as another semester (my previous college just counted it as part of the fall semester). So, I was unceremoniously booted out of trying to get into grad school.

Not to be beaten, I worked hard to find a job, and started paying on bills, with the goal of saving up and going back to college, with way too much in college debt (at this point, sitting at the 70K range).

While working, however, I started getting weird letters from my loan companies, telling me I was deliquint on my payments…. despite the fact I had been paying eachmonth on their website, and it had been nicely saying “payment received” each time. I called them up, and found out that after their computer system confirmed my payments, it turned around and rejected them afterwards, pretending that my bank account didn’t exist. No matter what I did, they woudln’t accept my payments. My credit score plummeted, and they were threatening to send a collector after me, DESPITE ME CONSTANTLY TRYING TO PAY! (I’ve learned a couple years later that some collection companies do this tactic so they can call a collection on you, in hopes of making more profit faster by this method, by seizing more than the loan’s actually worth or by guaranteeing they get stuff instead of risking you not having stable income the entire time of repayment.)

To make matters worse, my new job (which I was quite lucky to get) didn’t even last a year. The company, originally owned by a pretty cool guy, was bought out by a corporation, who proceeded to overwork and gut the company. I was jobless only a short while later.

The sad thing is, companies check your credit record before hiring you. So nobody has been hiring me since the collection agency trashed my credit score. On the flip side, the loss of job has meant the collection agency has nothing to seize (silver lining I guess, their plan backfired. They did try to send threating seisure notices, but by then it was too late.) So, thanks to the greed of corporations, I’m despite the fact I’ve been dedicated, focused, capable of doing work, and planning ahead, I’m stuck being jobless and with a credit score that prevents me from getting a job… so as a result of the loans neccesarry for it, my education has hurt my ability to get a job more than its helped it.

At this point, I don’t know if I’ll ever recover.

I don’t want to get into my personal debt story. I would just like to ask: if the Feds can bail out Wall Street and the European banks, why not Greece which is our spiritual homeland, and home to Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Homer and Zeus, Prometheus, Hera? Can’t we lean on the gov to help them out and not make an “example” out of them. 

I also want to work on a petition/grassroots movement to repeal new, well kind of new, federal bankruptcy law, which is much more harsh than old generous state laws, like Texas and Florida, where you could keep your house, etc. even a mansion in Florida.  

I can be contacted at bochehaggah@gmail.com regarding working together on these debtor friendly issues. Let’s help Greece and show the New World Order where they can put it.

BRZEE

Monthly income: $2000

Monthly student loan payments: $310 until 2033 (I’ll be 56)
$13000 in credit debt for monthly payments of: $375
30% of monthly income to creditors.
I’m lucky and my wife has a good job to pay our mortgage, insurance, buy groceries, pay bills, etc. If I was on my own, I’d be bankrupt.

All your life, you’re told that BK is the worst thing that can happen. For me, it was not.

In 2010, I walked away from more than $200K in debt in about 5 minutes. That is literally the length of time of our hearing, and we were not hassled in any way. I had let my ex-husband persuade me to take out all kinds of exotic loans for exotic reasons, using my good credit. In 2008, he left, and everything came crashing down. I got laid off from my job – which, however, allowed me to qualify for a Chapter 7 BK — and my dad was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. I was shattered. I literally walked with a limp for awhile.

But in the end, the BK itself never held me back in any significant way. Part of this is because I am so incredibly fortunate to have good friends and family in my life who held me up. I realize it was not just *me* that saved me — and that any others are not so fortunate.

But the point I wanted to make is about today. Today, I have a great job — actually working for myself. I am completely debt-free and have been since the day of my bankruptcy judgment. I am so far behind so many of my peers in terms of shit that I own, but it’s OK. I am thrilled to be in the black. This year, I have been able to give to all kind of causes — quiet loans to friends, lefty campaigns I believe in, the classical radio station, the hipster radio station, the dog in Texas that was tortured and needed a home, the Occupy Sandy effort. This cause. And: my own wedding. I feel like kind of a jerk saying all this, like I am gloating in the face of so many terrible stories — but the request issued was to visualize debt-free. So: it is fantastic.

My message is if you have to go through bankruptcy to get here, do it. It has to be a truly insurmountable debt, mind you — I have spoken to people with $15K, 20K of debt and strongly advised them to just climb out of it. But the chasm I was looking at — well, I just jumped in. And it was OK. It was all right.

I would say if you know you are sinking, just swallow your disbelief and your pride and face the facts. I lost my entire 401(k) when I didn’t have to … paying interest on massive loans I would just walk away from in a year. Face reality and face it quick, so you can stop taking phone calls and stop throwing money at these low-life lenders. I could have saved it for when I needed it — the courts will not take it away.

That is all.

save some of the money I earn working as n underpayeda college instructor (I could work at McDonalds and earn more money—seriously!), providing a safety cushion for my wife and I. We might be able to purchase a car. We might be able to save for a house. We could afford to buy heating oil for the house we rent, which at present we cannot. We could start our own business if we could save a little of our income to get it off it’s feet. BUt that’s the little stuff. If I didn’t have any debt my wife and I could start a family, because right now between the two of us we have +$225,000 in student loan debt and our monthly payments prohibit us from beginning or ever having a family—at all. We couldn’t hope to provide for a child let alone think we could eventually put them through school someday. We did exactly what we had always been told we needed to do to be successful, work hard, go to school, and you’ll find a good job. No. While we were in school the economy collapsed and we already had all the debt to carry. If I had no debt I would plan for the future rather than constantly trying to manage the present to stay afloat.

I lost my job in January of 2010 and I have been seeking work ever since. In February my brother and his wife basically forced me to move back in with my parents whom are not doing better than me. I started receiving my unemployment things were going well except for the one problem of unable to find a job. I though to my self after almost 1 year of searching and unable to find work that I should return to school. Having unemployment allowed me to pay my credit card bills up until the unemployment ran out right before I was able to complete my Bookkeeping course at college. Now I am still searching for work, my step dad works part time and my mother is in the hospital and we are worrying daily about losing our home. I have no clue what I will do in the future my credit is ruined for sure. I am just thankful my car was paid off before losing my unemployment. Now I wish for help daily to get Capital One off my back. I have been paying off tires that I put on my credit card for a car I don’t even have anymore. Well that’s It.

I was young and had never had a credit card and never wanted one. I got a job at Walmart and I guess they ran a credit report on me and saw I had none. They pressured me into getting a card with an $800 limit. I was reluctant but I thought I had a job that we wasn’t going anywhere. And they assured me that it would be easy and painless. After a few months I lost my job and where I lived getting a job was next to impossible. When I was working I was able to make the monthly payments, but the interest was getting me. I was jobless from November 2008 until June 2009. At that point the collectors called almost every other day. I now live in Tucson Arizona and have a great Jon, but I don’t know who has my debt anymore. Even if I did they want me to pay the full amount. I know better. I’ve been waiting more of less for an offer I think is fair to pay. Until then I will have to deal with having garbage credit, hoping that when I need to get a new car I can pay cash for it. Or hope I have a roommate that has incredible credit. Most renters won’t rent to me. I’m currently living in my parents den. If I had no debt I’m sure my life would be practically stress free and I could actually move on with my life.