I’ve never done anything like this before so I’m not really sure where to start. I feel like I need to give a little background as to how I ended up here. I’m family man originally from the PNW. I have a job and was living the kind of life I imagine a lot of people live, living and working to provide for my family. I have a job and was working towards moving up to buy my first house and start a college fund for my kids (15 and 18 since I know you’re wondering ;) ). Plans, as you know, tend to change suddenly when the word goes crazy.
Once the pandemic hit, the company I work for started putting people on furlough and I was one of those people. I was on furlough for 9 months, drained my savings to keep the lights on, but was eventually able to be brought back. They also put a freeze on all cost of living increases which is still in affect to this day. This, of course didn’t keep the cost of living from going up so it got harder and harder to make ends meet. In an effort to relieve some of that financial pressure, my wife and I started looking for alternate places to live where the cost of living isn’t as high. Since I work from home, I can take my wage with me and have a chance to have a little money to put away for rainy days. Eventually we settled on Oklahoma. We found a house for rent that was much cheaper than what we were currently paying and still met our needs. Pretty great right?! So we decided to sign the lease for the house site unseen. All we had to go on was the photos of the house on the listing, but the house still looked really good. Problem was we still didn’t have any savings and it was January so tax season wasn’t hear yet. So we decided to take out a personal loan to cover the costs of the move with the intent that we would use the tax returns to quickly pay the loans off. To save money, we decided to rent a U-haul and move everything ourselves. The next problem was that all of our stuff wouldn’t fit in their largest truck. So we sold/donated some of our furniture to make room in the truck with the intention that we would replace them after the move. We also decided to move the kids in with their aunt to finish out the school year, then come back for them once school was out. This was especially important to my oldest since he’s graduating High School this year. So with all that taken care of, we loaded the truck and off we went. Three days later we arrived in Oklahoma and we’re seeing our house for the first time. Without getting too far into it, we could tell that the photos that were used in the listing were not recent and they had used a negative zoom lens to make the rooms in the house appear larger than they really were. But we’re here now so we’re going to make the best of it. As planned, we replaced the furniture that we had to get ride of and replaced some other items that were broken during the move (got to be carful with those train track crossings). The moving truck, including the now sky high gas prices, ended up costing nearly the entire amount of the loan we had taken out. So we had to use our tax returns to pay for the furniture and appliances. So That brings me to why I’m making a post asking for financial help. We’re in a new place with a cheaper cost of living, but because we had to spend more than every cent we had, we still have just as much expenses as we had before the move, but now with more debt. So I’m here asking for help paying off that debt. I know what I’m asking for is what a lot of people want “no more debt”. And I know that there are a lot of other people out there whose needs far outweigh my own. I’m asking because I made a decision to try to provide a better life for my family and there were consequences to that decision that I just didn’t foresee and I would like help to get to the reason I had made the move to begin with. If you made it this far, you’re a trooper! Thank you for taking the time to hear my story and my request and every help received is extremely appreciated.
https://paypal.me/JBrooks0306?country.x=US&locale.x=en_US