Hello, my name is Chelsea. I am a mother of 2 children ages 4 and 2.
In June, my husband ended his enlistment in the Army. We knew it would be a bit of a transition back into the ‘real world’, but we have been having an extremely difficult time adjusting. My husband is in school to be a paramedic, but in the meanwhile he is working a third shift job that doesn’t pay enough to pay our debts. We are waiting and hoping for him to get a better job, but as we wait our financial issues just keep spiraling and I feel like we are drowning in all of this.
We were doing well at first– we bought a house in June and our debt to income ratio was low enough at that point that we saw no issue with being able to afford everything. Then my husband changed jobs, our car stopped working and we had to take on a different car payment, we incurred some medical expenses… Life happened, despite our best efforts to keep our finances under control.
During the move from the Army back home, we incurred a lot of debt. We gathered even more debt once we bought this house, as apparently being a homeowner isn’t as picturesque as one would think.
Every day feels like an uphill battle. I cry a lot, I scheme, I try to dream up ways to get out of this situation. I am trying to trust God and not worry but it’s hard when I have two small people relying on me to have it together. I have to decide which bills to pay and which ones can be late. I have deferred as many payments as I can, but they are going to catch up to me and I still won’t be able to pay them.
Things will get better, but right now I can’t get on top of our debt to get us there. If I could pay down some of our credit card debt, at least the interest wouldn’t keep adding and adding and snowballing out of control. Or if I could pay our mortgage a couple of months in advance, or our car payment, it would give us a little bit of room to breathe. Anything would help.
Family has helped as much as they can. We don’t come from money. I hate asking for help.. I don’t even know if anyone will see this. I am just out of options. I don’t know how else to get my family out of this hole. I just need a little bit of an edge.
If anyone did read this, thank you for hearing me. Please pray for us to overcome this and to climb back out of this season of darkness.
-chelsea