by Jim
Melissa and I were doing good for the first year of us living together, we were working on maintaining her good credit, by adding a few lines of credits, but always paying off the full amount at the end of the month. The only debt that wasn’t being paid off in its entirety was the car payment, and a $6,000 loan we took out in order to furnish our apartment.
We each had many things that could have partially furnished our dwelling, but we both decided we didn’t want anything from the past being brought into our present and future. Which to this day, I will stand by saying that it was a good decision. Little did I realize our 18 month same as cash loan, the payments that they provided didn’t add up to the same amount.
By the middle of 2010 we had 3 credit cards, 3 store credit cards, 1 jewelry card, 1 furniture loan, and 1 car loan. We were doing just fine, that is when all the (pardon the language) shit hit the floor. We have been in a long standing battle with Dipshit the wife’s ex over two things custody and the house that he lived in that has Melissa’s name on it.
Well on the custody front, as we fought for full custody, he tried to fight and say that my wife was mentally incompetent to support her daughter, the judge ordered Psychological Evaluations be done. This cost $1,200 dollars, that plus the lawyer’s fees just kept adding up.
On top of all this we were in a legal battle with him over getting Melissa’s name off the house. So there were more lawyer/legal fees. We decided to take out another $5,000 loan. At this point in time, we are still able to maintain our payments.
Well all said and done, let’s just say that we couldn’t have picked a worse lawyer to help us with these two legal matters. Friends of ours recommended this lawyer, but in my opinion she didn’t do anything and we had to keep on her to do things. So we end up with the same custody stipulations that we had, and nothing was done about the house. Basically $5,000 down the drain. We chalk it up to being naive and knowing nothing about the law.
In July of 2010, while on vacation Melissa proposed to me on the beach. I was shocked, not really expecting it, but very excited. On Christmas day, I re-proposed to her and on 1/1/11 we were married, in a very small wedding that didn’t cost us anything besides the cost of the marriage license and her engagement ring and wedding ring, which I put on the jewelry card.
It’s funny to look back and you can pinpoint the very instance the downward spiral started. It was February of 2011, one month after Melissa and I were married. Dipshit The ex started his crap again, saying he couldn’t afford the house anymore and threw the keys at Melissa and moved down the street from the house to his mom’s. Kinda funny, since he made more money than I did, and I managed to pay rent (when I was single) that was twice as much as the mortgage.
So what are we to do? We decided that we couldn’t risk hurting Melissa’s great credit that we carefully built up, so we couldn’t let this house go into foreclosure. We decide we will live in the house, after seeing the inside of this house, I decide that I just couldn’t live in the house with it looking like it did (ugly stained carpet, holes in the wall, etc.) So with the help of my dad, her step father, and a close family friend, we started working on this house. We were paying our rent for the apartment we were living in, paying all the bills for it, plus paying for all the remodeling of this house, and the mortgage and bills.
Some how we were managing to keep up with it. Her parents loaned us money to do this remodeling, since we didn’t have that big chunk of change at our disposable. We put in another $5,000 dollars into this house, and were about to take out another loan for I think it was for $3,500 for carpet, when we finally had the last straw.
Legal fact that didn’t dawn on us, since we never did it ourselves. But you could legally walk into a house that has your name on it at anytime you wanted. Dipshit He did it at least three times to us, and with him living down the street, my wife didn’t think she could handle the added stress, due to her disability. During the times he walked in on us, he started taking pictures and posting on the internet that we were destroying the house. If destroying meant, running all new electrical in the house, re-drywalling and insulating the downstairs, and many other things, then yeah we were “destroying” the house.
Melissa and I decided we would take the credit hit if need be, but we wouldn’t deal with any of this madness any longer. So we told him we weren’t going to keep paying on the house. Funny how things work out, in less then a week Dipshit He moved back into the “destroyed” house. (There is more to this story, which will be shared at another time) All I’m thinking is thank god, it wasn’t a week later when we would have gotten the carpet installed.
Then the madness happened, in July I hurt my back (thinking I was a teenager still, doing a backflip off the diving board), and was out of work for about two months. Trying to work on that house had taken out our savings completely, so you can guess what happened. We couldn’t keep up with the payments. By the time I got back to work, the damage already set in, and we were in debt to our necks.
Trying to catch up on everything and with big events coming (X-mas and daughter’s b-day) we didn’t know what to do. Then it got worse, a few days before Christmas I was let go from my job. Through various methods, I had some money coming in each month, but it wasn’t that much, nor did it help with our debt problems.
Basically we cut back on many things, and made my part time income into a passable income we could live on.
