Hello to all who stumble upon this, I appreciate you taking your time to stop and read this.
I am a desperate man in a desperate situation and I am by no means asking for a full bailout of my current situation, I am humbly asking only what I need to get back to an even playing field. What I am hoping to find is an audience who can relate to or empathize with my current plight and willing to help us.
I do not want to bore anyone with the same old pandemic story so I will do best to try to summarize the downfall of our family and the uphill battle that is currently taking place in our lives.
To begin I will give you a little background on our life prior to the pandemic. I was the sole provider in my family of 3 which contains my wife, my son and myself. I worked in the Hotel industry and made enough money to pay for all of the family’s expenses while my wife stayed at home with our then 3 year old son. Our life was far from lavish nor could we splurge on things many consider luxuries but we lived comfortably and happily with where we were economically. When the pandemic started we had just moved to a new state and lived about an hour from New York, NY for a new job. Unfortunately because of the proximity to NYC we were one of the first places in the country to begin the long shut down, the hotel industry took a very quick and substantial economical hit which lead to indefinite layoffs in less than month into the pandemic (late February/Early March 2020) in our area. The timing of the pandemic was bad for everyone but it was especially bad for us because we had not yet established a permanent place to live in our new city and with no job we would have no hopes of finding a permanent place to live leaving us essentially homeless. With my tail tucked and my head low I reached out to my Mother and explained our situation and asked for what I thought would be a short term place to live. Thankfully my mother was willing to take us in with open arms despite the fact that we would be a burden to her own finances. Once settled in our new sanctuary I began the unemployment process which at the time I thought would be simple and straightforward only to find that it was nothing of the sort. Because I had just moved to a new state and there was a rollover of the calendar year yet another unique challenge awaited me, neither the previous state or the current state I was in was sure who was responsible for the unemployment. Fast forward 6 months and I still had not received any unemployment payments while desperately working the phones and writing congressmen hoping to get the situation resolved. During the time where we had gotten no assistance from unemployment we ran through all of our savings while we continued to pay our financial obligations until there was nothing left. After 8 months I started to get unemployment and the back pay for the previous months which was just in time to have my repossessed car returned to me and enough to keep me out of collections with my creditors. Keeping me out of collections is not say that there was not significant payments that were behind as I could only afford what I was able to negotiate with the creditors on a monthly basis. I had also not been able to give my Mother anything during the time of our stay which I needed to make right as well, 3 extra mouths to feed, water and electricity usage etc. was truly a heavy burden for her.
fast forward to January of 2021 I was finally able to get a job, albeit not in the industry I had worked for for 20 years and not at the salary I was accustomed to but it was still a job.
Armed with my new job and a sense of finally being able to breathe again along with a new outlook on spending habits we began our slow crawl back to what we hoped would be normalcy. The debt remained and new debt would be sure to come as we planned our exit from cohabitation with my mother but there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Arguably the worst time in my wife and l’s life looked as if it was coming to an end. Slowly but surely we began allocating what we could to saving for deposits on a place to live, utilities, and a little towards emergency savings while still paying down our debt.
Several months later we were finally able to move out into our own place, being on a very reduced salary compared to what I was making pre pandemic didn’t make it easy but we did it. My wife took on a job which paid for our son’s preschool and maybe a couple hundred extra dollars a month to assist in the bills so it was still a struggle but we felt like we were making progress. We continued that path and while we were not able to afford luxuries such as health insurance we were able to keep our heads above water until the recent inflation. I am currently still working at the same job I took in January of 2021 however no raises have been given to anyone because neither profits or revenues have returned to pre pandemic numbers so we are told it is just not possible. My wife continues to work part time in the same capacity as before, enough to pay for our son’s school and a couple hundred extra. We can not afford child care so one of us must be home with our son after school so it is not possible for my wife to get a full time job due to my schedule. At this point we are extremely frugal in all aspects of our spending with the exception of the needs of our son. We do pay $500 a month for our son’s education because even if we have to make sacrifices like not eating breakfast or lunch it is worth it for him to get an education which our local public schools unfortunately can not provide. We make sure that our son has clothes that fit him and do not allow his toes touch the end of his shoes for more than a week. We make sure that our son eats healthy and buy him food that we do not eat because it is his and not communal, my wife takes 45 minutes everyday in the evenings to make sure that his food for the next day at school is prepared so there are no processed foods in his diet. I mention all of this regarding my son because if there is one thing that we make sure never wavers it is our dedication to being parents. We know that there will be times that our son will have to face harsh realities of the world but for now we just want him to live a normal life and have a happy childhood.
I can say that yes we are surviving but it is becoming harder and harder everyday and it is getting to the point where we are now falling behind again because we are continuing to carry the baggage of almost a years worth of debt that we were not able to pay for during the pandemic . We currently have $13,778.94 in debt that continues to haunt us from the pandemic period, we have done very well in keeping up with minimum payments and have not acquired any new debt but we find ourselves losing all of the footing we have made once again and I am desperate to not lose any ground. I am looking for a new job which would hopefully be at least within 20-30 thousand of what I was making before but the hospitality industry is still suffering in many areas of the country.
To any and all that would be willing to help us with anything, anything at all we would be truly grateful. I am not the type of person to ask much less beg for help but I am humbly on my knees asking. I apologize for the extremely long post and I thank you for the time you gave to read it regardless if you can help or not.
below is my PayPal should you choose to help out. Thank you again. paypal.me/JThompson738