My name is Matt and this is the hardest thing I have had to do in my life. Our family of 4 is in desperate need of assistance with an eviction judgement we received yesterday and the blackhole of debt we are finding ourselves in from the past few years.
We need help. Our goal right now is to find a place to move to within the week, pay our car up to the current balance and trade it in for a lower payment, and find better jobs. After that, paying down the back rent debt with legal fees will be my biggest priority.
We are looking for any good leads on 2-3 bedroom rentals and jobs too. I am self-taught/minimal training needed for a vast majority of what I do from maintenance (10+ years) to stage, sound, and lights management (2+ years). It doesn’t come up below but I am the IT go-to here, as well. That’s been a pattern since my teachers couldn’t keep up with the nerds in high school so we ended up teaching some of the classes. So I am also proficient with a lot of IT related stuff.
Back rent and legal fees are roughly $8000. The car payment is $480 per month and we are currently teetering on the precipice of repossession there at almost $2000. I make regular payments that are slightly more than required to try bringing that down over time but it’s only an extra $20 each time.
I am going to try not to write a whole book here despite having enough to fill several at this point. Edit: I failed there. Sorry for the ramble and jumping around. I’m going to leave the whole story underneath and give a quick current day summary up here.
Backstory for those interested:
In 2019, I moved back home to help with my grandmother's cancer diagnosis and some milder financial issues. I was getting back on my feet working later hours generally so someone was always at home with her. And then COVID happened. I was laid off from my job as a bowling mechanic/general maintenance for a while to allow me to draw unemployment but I was still working and doing some big projects while I didn't have to coordinate around the business being open. I got stimulus checks like most people and I used those for day to day costs during the lockdowns and to pay off some outstanding debts from student loans. I was still driving around a lot to do my work and help out at home, so those checks and unemployment ran out around the time we were opening back up. That's around September 2020. The experimental treatment they gave my grandmother worked and she was cancer-free until around May 2021. In routine testing, they saw it coming back quickly and she was just in decline from that point on.
Throughout all of this, Valerie and I were looking for a place to move to. As the lockdown restrictions were slowly easing, she was working at a bagel place that was still drive-thru only. She got on there as the store manager and was making a great salary and seemed to enjoy the job. The owner there had some new townhouses being built so we jumped on the wait for that. Things were getting stressful by July so I used some of the funds we had during that time to give us a small vacation for her birthday. She became pregnant and we started planning even more frantically to be ready when the townhouse was ready but we kept it quiet, not telling anyone except a few close friends. She started spending more time with me at home and that's when she learned how I had to walk on eggshells my whole life. I had known it was bad but I didn't realize how bad it was without that outside perspective. A few months in and her doctor started growing concerned about her blood pressure rising as it had been trending up the more she was around my mom (we still believe she was a factor in it because Valerie's BP hasn't reached that level again since, with 1 exception we will get to). We lost that baby to a miscarriage before the end of 2020. We grieved and focused on getting her health in a better place.
In May of 2021, my grandmother fell hard getting out of bed. The day is still a blur of everything in my mind. The thing that sticks out most, though, was my grandmother's denial that she had fallen at all (she said she just laid down) and my mom's willingness to believe that and just carry on as normal. I managed to get my uncles and my brother over there to convince her that it needed to be taken seriously and we needed to move around our living arrangements to accommodate my grandmother's needs at that point. She begrudgingly gave in at that point. We moved her upstairs to the room I had been occupying so she wouldn't have to go up and down the stairs to do anything. After a few days of church members coming by to sit with her and help out, she had declined to the point where we had to call in hospice services for assistance. My fiancé, Valerie, moved in to the house at that point to help give me some support (I keep having to stop typing this because it's still difficult to think about that time) and also assist with changing bedding, monitoring oxygen and such.
My grandmother never got out of that bed without assistance and she passed less than 10 days later.
While she was on her deathbed, my mom fought with my aunt over visiting periods and arrangements for the funeral. They continued to fight after the funeral over going through her things and making sure everyone had something to remember her. My grandmother wanted to be buried with her necklace that had her stamped or melted down wedding ring on it. My mom kept it.
During this period, I learned a lot about how the family drama plays out. My mom and grandmother bought that house together back in the early 2000s. My mom's credit wasn't good enough to ever get a house but my grandmother actually had great credit due to her limited use of it and using the benefits she got as a military widow to pay anything off immediately. Important to note here is that my aunt had power of attorney for my grandmother because she had been living with their family before moving to help us out. She was not paying anything living with them.
By the time we are getting to current (2021) events, that credit has been tanked and to everyone's surprise, my mom has the power of attorney. I don't want to get too conspiratorial here but my understanding is that that should not have been possible with my aunt holding that at the time. My mom works in the local government. Leaving that there and the other facts still stand.
After the funeral, my mom banned anyone in the family (except my uncle who was helping her) from our house in an attempt to keep them from going through any paperwork or my grandmother’s belongings. At the same time, she was telling everyone to take anything they wanted before she donated the rest (clothes, blankets, etc.).
Valerie was pregnant again in May and we actually told people after the funeral this time. Somehow, my mother became even more overbearing. We limited our interactions with her as much as possible but she was wanting us out of the house now. We were still waiting on the townhouse to be ready and the stress levels just kept elevating from there. She got to the point where she even said we were making up the townhouse to keep living there.
She got tired of waiting and told us we needed to be out by the end of November. The townhouse wasn’t going to be ready for that so we scrambled to find another solution. Valerie’s blood pressure started to spike again (due date was late December) and her doctor wanted to go ahead and schedule the delivery but she wanted to get us moved first so he put her on strict bed rest. She tried to take maternity leave from her job at that point but they just let her go completely. Luckily, my job is owned by one of the largest developers in the city so I went to them desperate for a quick move-in solution. They worked with us and we got a discount (in the form of my job paying a portion of the rent per month) and I took out some credit cards and a loan to get us moved as quickly as possible.
We moved everything we had in 1 day. Once we had the truck parked, I moved the few big items with some help and then spent the rest of the night into the next day moving everything so I could return the truck on time. I would not let Valerie help at all outside of the small box she carried up initially.
Our son was delivered by C-section 2 days later.
We managed bills and rent ok for a few months because of the loan I had taken and tax returns. Valerie was interviewing with Verizon for a remote job but the process was being dragged out and we started struggling by May to pay the rent completely. She got on in the cafeteria at a nearby school but was only able to work for a few weeks before summer break. I went to my boss for help and we arranged to have the back rent paid and have it come out of my paycheck to pay it back. With the reduction on my paycheck, though, we struggled even more to continue paying. We have gone through this whole process 3 times now and even increased the amount my job was paying towards our rent eventually but it was all solutions that didn’t address the core lack of funds.
In September of 2022, we opened a 2nd business and I took on a 2nd job there handling building maintenance and the mechanical bull that was one of a few of our main attractions. Balancing the maintenance at 2 locations was a trial but doable because we were living next door. In October, I was told that my role would be expanding to cover the stage management with live bands every Friday and Saturday night and some events during the week. That role was given to me at the beginning of December and I have been doing it since.
2023 was largely uneventful for the purposes of this but the pattern continued. We were able to somewhat keep up during the school year and then fell off through the summer. We gave up one of the cars we had been making payments on and went down to sharing 1 vehicle. I had another lump sum arrangement made and we increased the amount that was being contributed in the middle of the year. I did some side work for the property management side of the company (pressure washing, building reports and cleaning, other odd jobs as needed) to help go towards the rent but I was already stretched thin. Around halfway through the year, the accounting side of the business (that was responsible for actually doing the payment for my job’s contribution) started missing some payments. It did not cause any real issues besides making our account reflect a larger total than what it should have but it drove my anxiety crazy and I brought it to their attention through my boss. Valerie was going to her doctor to get to the core of the blood pressure issues she had during her pregnancy.
I continued to learn more about running the sound and started defining the workflow, upgraded the lighting setup and added some custom control. We hired help for the bowling alley because the stage was taking more of my time throughout the year with us still trying to figure out the live music business and building up our resources.
Now we get into 2024 and the increasing spiral we have that is core to our current issue. In January, our son was diagnosed as autistic. We had been having our suspicions for this based on some of his activities so we requested to have him assessed at Siskin. This actually opens us up to some assistance that we immediately started applying for. This includes different developmental therapies and we might qualify for financial assistance (more on that in a moment).
In March, Valerie finally got a diagnosis: IGA nephropathy, which is a disease that causes kidney inflammation and interferes with the kidneys’ ability to filter waste from the blood. It is terminal but can be managed so they started treatments and she gets checked monthly to monitor the progress. She has been given about 5 years before she will need a kidney transplant or regular dialysis.
Since March, we have had multiple assessments with our son to get him into the right therapies he needs. He is currently attending ABA therapy 5 days a week, speech once a week, and we are waiting for a spot to open for at least 1 more that he needs. All of the applications for financial assistance were done back in January at the start of this. We were told around April that Siskin’s assessment wasn’t enough and they wanted their own doctor to do one. That finally happened at the end of August and we are waiting for the results. We have been told most applicants get denied initially and then have to go through an appeals process.
We are now in September of 2024. School just started back so Valerie’s income started back up. She had been looking for work throughout the summer but didn’t land anything. I was able to make a payment for most of the rent at the end of August. We still owed most of the summer, though. We received notice of their intent to evict us the 2nd week of September. We got the court summons another week later. I requested a meeting to have it dealt with again but didn’t get it until the night before our court date so there was really nothing that could be done by then. My plan was to go in and ask for 30 days to take care of it and not lose our home and quite possibly my job now we aren’t going to be close by. The business employs experienced lawyers (given their size, they have to) so there was absolutely no way to avoid being kicked out, according to him. We have been given 10 days to vacate the property which is going to fall on October 20th.
We need help. Our goal right now is to find a place to move to, pay our car up to the current balance and trade it in for a lower payment, and find better jobs. After that, paying down the back rent debt with legal fees will be my biggest priority.
I am looking for any good leads on rentals and jobs too. I am self-taught/ for a vast majority of what I do from maintenance to stage and sound management. It didn’t come up before but I am the IT go-to here as well. That’s been a pattern since my teachers couldn’t keep up with the nerds in high school so we ended up teaching some of the classes occasionally. So I am also proficient with a lot of IT related stuff.
Back rent and legal fees are roughly $8000. The car payment is $480 per month and we are currently teetering on the precipice of repossession there at almost $2000. I make regular payments that are slightly more than required to try bringing that down over time but it’s only an extra $20 each time.
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