my ditty

Well, here's my go at it...

life started really sucking right after i graduated college.. i should have figured, i graduated on friday 13th!! a full year early, i was thinking life would be good. That is, until I couldn't get a job. Seems nobody wants to hire somebody with a degree in Zoology. I had worked at the zoo previously to get my foot in the door, but so many people want to work there I would have to kill some people in the mile long line to get in. I worked at vets, kennels, pet stores... but i was pretty good with my debt. I paid off my credit cards every single month. I still lived at home with my parents. Life, looking back, was good.

Then at the end of '03 life got a lot worse. My dad got cancer, and I was stuck at a crap-paying job. In april 2004, I had made a decision to do a temp to hire job with a scientific company. My mom encouraged me to do so, despite the risk, saying she would help me out if something went awry. So I made the switch. A month or so after that, my dad had a bone marrow transplant. My mom was under a lot of stress at that time, and, as I own birds and dogs, called me up to tell me I had better not be at home when they got back, and asked if I wanted to be responsible for killing my father.

Of course, that's a pretty big blow for one person, and I certainly wasn't getting rid of my animals, so I looked around for a place to live immediately. I couldn't live in an apartment because the birds were loud and I don't want to walk my dogs five times a day. My best friend was in the same situation. Neither could afford to live on our own, so we looked around and bought a cheap HUD home, which we eventually fixed up.

In that time period shortly after buying the home, I lost my temp to hire job. Luckily, I had a friend at a nearby pet store, and had a new job that same afternoon. However, now I was making $7 an hour. Needless to say, I can't afford to live where I am (and it's not a great area anyway, nor a great house). A series of unfortunate events, like one of my dogs needed emergency vet care, went onto the credit cards. Groceries, little odds and ends, well, they all add up quick. I moved out in June 2004 and have racked up $17000 in credit card debt since then. My roommate puts more money into the joint account than I can afford to, and we usually dine on ramen noodles or just go hungry. Last year I had to have my gallbladder removed, and my workplace does not offer health insurance to its peons. Luckily for me, since they pay me so terribly, I am below the poverty level and the hospital paid my medical bills. I didn't pay a dime. Except for that week and a half I couldn't work.

I am currently with a debt settlement company, because I still only make $8.25 an hour and my debt is more than I make in a year. My payment is $252, which leaves me with $48 a month to buy gas and food, so you can imagine how often I try to zip over to my parents' for dinner. Discover sold off my account 18 days after I joined debt settlement, despite my making every previous payment on time and at least the minimum. The collection agency firm is currently threatening litigation. The free lawyer I contacted advised me to declare bankruptcy, but when he found out I have a HUD home (has a lot of equity in it) told me we'd likely have to sell the house because of the equity. It doesn't matter that I have nowhere to live, and now that my credit is ruined there's no place that will take me. I still can't live in an apartment. Apparently it doesn't matter that I only own half the house either. It seems I'm always slipping through the cracks in this kind of stuff, getting screwed over several times.

My parents were nice enough to lend me their lawyer, who is looking into things for me. I get between 30-40 collector calls a day. Chase sent me a statement telling me to make a minimum payment of $1500. I don't even make that in a month. Ironically the same day they sent me a little greeting card about how they would help me get my payments back on track. Yeah. Thanks.

So overall, I'm a horribly depressed person, I work 40 hours a week at my regular job, come home and work another 40 at my little business I run, and still can't make the ends meet. My credit is ruined, collectors call me nonstop, my workplace is filled with sixteen year olds, debt settlement seems to just be a big scam, I can't declare bankruptcy and can't afford to, and my roommate doesn't understand why I'm grouchy all the time. I wonder.