I finally maxed out my few credit cards that I had acquired at the age of 46. I was in my 18th year of cleaning houses for a living, two years away from a Bachelor’s degree, living in student housing with my eleven year old son, in a very tiny apartment barely larger than two walk-in closets. It was upstairs. The walls were made of cinder block. The floors were hard tiled floors like those of a college classroom. I grew a large wall of morning glory vines up the stair well and a few people told me the rerouted their morning drive in order to see my flowers each morning.
I was in menopause. My son was an adolescent who had had no semblance of a father figure in his life. My daughter, while no longer living with me, was still giving me hell almost every time we made contact. She came to the homes that I’d cleaned for almost 20 years and made scenes outside in their driveways.
I did not have the room, the resources, or the strength to accommodate her in the first place. I slept on a cot in the living room. The place was less than 300 square feet.
So, I realized that I could no longer pay my credit card monthly payments. I’d cut down my housecleaning list considerably while attending full time college and raising my son, no financial help from anyone. Thankfully, student housing kept us from being homeless.
I went to a credit counselor with my maxed out credit card debt, and proof of my financial situation. It was a free counseling government subsidized credit counseling service. The woman looked it all over and then looked at me and said, don’t make another payment on this debt. She explained how it would be impossible for me to pay it off, and said my priority should be to remain in college and take care of my son. She recommended that I contact an attorney and file for bankruptcy, which I did.
I called my mother and asked for help with the debt. She told me she’d talk to her husband and get back with me. They offered to loan me the money at six percent interest. The credit counseling service advised against this. So, I contacted an attorney.
The attorney told me a long story explaining that someone in my financial situation was better off simply not paying the credit card bill. She explained there are no debtor’s prisons in Texas, said they couldn’t hurt me or take my property, that they would write it off and it would take seven years to build my credit again after that. I decided it was worth the trade.
Spoiler alert. It wasn’t.
Our phone began to ring off the hook with calls from the creditors. This was before cell phones. Creditors yelled at my ten year old son and accused him of lying when I was once in the shower. It was humiliating and frightening.
We kept the phone unplugged for months, maybe a year, until we learned to just hang up on them.
After several years, the calls did stop, but it remained on my credit record making it impossible to buy a home without a co-signer at the age of 65. But worse than that, I learned that Bank of America had continued to add on penalties and interest every month for years, doubling my original debt in the end. The attorney had told me they would “write it off”, which they eventually did.
I learned, at the end that, “writing it off” meant that the IRS would come after you with penalties which, for me, amounted to half the debt. Since Bank of America had doubled my original debt, this means that in the end I had to pay off the original debt, only to the IRS. Ironic karma.
The lesson in this is that at that particular time I should have payed the $500 to file bankruptcy, and we could have avoided all the harassment and the penalty. The attorney didn’t seem to have all of this information.
Oikos 