I have been a single mother for most of my children’s lives. Their father has not contributed anything to support raising my two daughters who are now 22 and 15. When the oldest was four, the California courts ordered him to pay $0 child support and gave me full custody. After the second was born, she was added to the same order with an addendum. Overall, he never was required to help so he didn’t help. Over the years, I worked multiple jobs, put myself through college and university, and applied myself the best I knew how.
Learning about proper financing and how to manage a home, credit, savings, etc was not something I realized in my younger years that I needed to dive into. I went about living paycheck to paycheck with a very basic understanding of finances. It took the pandemic and several acquaintances with similar situations to mine being in better financial health for me to realize I was missing something.
I have worked hard to build credit, savings, and live within my means. Like many, I ran into roadblocks over the years that drained the savings before I could refill it and hit my credit more than I wanted it to, though I am consistently working towards building better always.
My present situation is that I have to house share with my oldest daughter in order to pay basic living expenses. My income and hers is enough to cover the bills with limited savings ($100/month started over in December 2023). The concern is that she had been working from home and was moved back into an office setting, forcing her to buy a car since there is not public transportation available to her work from our apartment. So we are both paying on cars now, which limits our basic living funds and she is maxed out at her portion of the rent and her personal bills (doctor, credit, vehicle, insurance, etc).
Last year we had unfortunately both been in car accidents (3 in total), 1 of which was a hit and run in a rental I was driving that I am still dealing with financially. That was the largest crux of what ate up our small savings, and now with less than $200 in savings, I have another $750 to pay for the hit and run.
On top of all that, being at the bare line to pay the monthly living expenses makes it stressful because I am always concerned about another incident causing more financial stress. I was diagnosed with Asthma last year, but there is ongoing testing with my lower quarter left lung not responding to treatments. While I have insurance, it is high deductible, meaning everything from January 1 until I pay my portion of the deductible ($8,000) will be out of pocket.
All of this together is difficult to manage and I am trying to find a way to cut down expenses, like paying off the car I am paying on so I can put more into savings for emergencies. I am also trying to start a Cottage Food business because I learned during the holidays that the sweets I make for colleagues and friends is something many people like enough they are willing to pay for it. Starting that does cost, however, so it’s on hold until I can manage funds to properly start it.
I recently received notice that my student loans are set to a repayment amount of $0.00 per month through December 2024 due to my limited income, which will help me get things sorted to restart payments in January 2025. Realistically, however, I do not want to wait to start paying if possible since my student loans are over $50,000 in total. Waiting is not going to make the burden smaller. For transparency sake, the degree I received was expected to help me with promotions in the company I work for, but the positions that would apply to are not presently available and not expected for another year or two now. I am consistently looking to improve this situation by networking and searching for new opportunities, but as of yet I have not been able to secure something better.
I have not been able to look beyond my own pride to ask for help in this way in the past. It has, unfortunately, taken me many years of hard work, spinning my wheels, and failed attempts to resolve this situation on my own or through the help of friends, family, and networking to be able to even consider asking for help in this way. I really don’t know what I should be writing for this message, so I am simply putting what I believe is relevant to my situation so that other people understand why I am asking for help. I could probably talk for hours about all the ways financial help would benefit my small family.
paypal.me/DilettanteMe