Calling everyone who refuses to be a victim! Share your success!

[Greebo]

I have been having a very depressing conversation with a cousin of mine who asserts that the "fat cat" rich have had the scales tipped in their favor for too long, and that the average "peon" cannot get ahead.

It is, in my view, the ultimate victim mentality - nobody's able to do anything to help themselves. My argument to her is that its also easily proven wrong - if only ONE person who's a "peon" takes control of their lives, in spite of the "fat cats", it can be done.

So - I have a request. I would like to hear from EVERYONE here who is/has:
- Low income (factor in kids by all means)
- Suffered a downturn as a result of the economy
- Still working to make your current and future lives better
- Experiencing success - no matter how small.

Please - share your stories. Tell us what's gone wrong for you in the last two years, and how you've dealt with that situation, and what you're doing now to make your situation better.

Thanks in advance!

[Greebo]

I started this in the Debt/Money forum but its not really a money topic - its a life topic. So I moved it.

[MaryCarney]

Excellent idea!!!

[tervsforme]

I have a small success. I sold my RV about a month ago, in this economy! It was for sale for over a year and after I took a deposit 3 more people were all of a sudden interested in it. It will take a few more weeks to get caught up with a couple of things, but selling this will really help my budget and allow me to pay off my last credit card quicker!

[Greebo]

I have a small success. I sold my RV about a month ago, in this economy! It was for sale for over a year and after I took a deposit 3 more people were all of a sudden interested in it. It will take a few more weeks to get caught up with a couple of things, but selling this will really help my budget and allow me to pay off my last credit card quicker!

Would you be ok with sharing your income and how the current economic crisis has affected you in a negative way?

[Daisygirl]

Great topic, Greebo.

My story is a little bit backwards. I was making over $60K a year at a car dealership until just recently, despite the downturn in the economy and the troubles in the automotive industry. I wsas really pleased with the fact that as a single mom with no specialized education or degree that I was able to do this.

Corporate lack of empathy had bothered me some in the past but never affected me directly until my dear father's illness. My dad became ill in February. I accessed unemployment that was allowable by taking a week off in March, two weeks off in May and two weeks off in July. I will be forever grateful I got to spend that time with him and it is worth any financial gain that I missed out on.

My position was paid on a sales bonus basis. During the March and May visits, I received my bonus. In July, when I was there seeing Dad, he died. Suddenly my leave changed from family leave to bereavement leave.

When I returned after making funeral arrangements, getting my mom over the hump and dealing with all of the financial issues a death involves, I went right back to work. Imagine my surprise when the corporate bigwigs decided not to pay me the bonus for the month of July. They told me (and this is a direct quote). "If you had been on vacation you would be eligible for the bonus, but bereavement leave allows it to be up to our discretion whether to pay you or not."

Can you imagine? They said this to a single mother who sold over $3 million in service in less than 2 years! THe amoung in question? A meager (to them) $2600!

I did something I have never done before. I looked the big guy right in the eye and said, "I'm not going to be able to work for you anymore." He was completely astounded and recommended I take some time to think about. I replied "What is there to think about? Whether or not I want to give you another chance to rip me off? I recommend you think about whether or not you wnt to pay me what you owe me."

Needless to way, no one reconsidered. I walked out without notice.

I notified the organization withwhom I had applied for a business loan that I had taken a leap of faith and left my job to start the business. Within a week, I had my anwer from them. After 12 other places had turned me down, they admired the fact I felt strongly enough about my idea to just go for it. They wrote me a check for over $30K and I opened the doors to my shop 2 weeks ago. My kids are able to come to the store after school and I am able to see them off in the morning. I am no longer putting in 55 hours a week where I don't see my girls.

Also: I am pursuing legal action to get my bonus from the car dealership.

[Early Bird]

I have a long-term success story:

Dad was a Navy enlisted man. With 4 kids. We always had a roof over our heads and food on the table, but we were probably pretty low on the income scale.

Dad couldn't have afforded to send us to college, even if his old-fashioned mindset would have considered it.

All 4 of us kids enlisted in the military after high school. And we all had our sights set on college.

The military (and GI bill) helped all of us get degrees.

Those degrees have been springboards to much better jobs.

So, my conclusion is that education is one way to overcome the problems of insufficent income. But not just any education: A theater degree holds less guarantee of job success than an engineering degree.

If I were forced to back to work today, and if my education didn't suffice for a decently-paying job, I'd get a basic job to pay the bills -- and then take night classes to make myself more marketable. So what, that I'd be in classes with 20-year-olds. I'd get through. I'd scrimp so that I could afford tuition, knowing that the payoff would make it worthwhile in future years.

[tervsforme]

Would you be ok with sharing your income and how the current economic crisis has affected you in a negative way?

For me, there are just a few things that have made a negative inpact. My company cut out our overtime during the summer, although now is my busy time and I can work as much overtime as I can handle. The other issue was when Chase increased their minimum payment from 2% to 5%. The first two months of that were awful. Now that I sold my RV, it will be much easier. I am single, with no kids. I make an above average income and I also have a couple of clients on the side. There were times this summer that I needed the check from my side job to buy dog food.

I am thankful every day, for my job and this site. Since joining here I have become a changed person with spending, now not spending!

[andrew's mom]

I consider my life happy. My husband works for a custom computer sales company and gets a good chunk of his income from those sales. With the economy tanking his income shrank by about $1,000 a month. However, we made some adjustments and we are no worse off than we were before. We foresaw this and we aggresively put money away in an EF. We got rid of home internet and cable. We don't eat out as much. DH started a beer homebrewing hobby so we don't pay for expensive beer (we love our good beer). I make our own detergent, baby wipes, shop at resale stores and cook from scratch a lot. But STILL, I take the baby to a very good and caring home daycare. We still have a lot of fun with our friends and we'll take our first, all inclusive family vacation (already paid for).
Even with the lost income we still have enough to live the good life (according to us), be happy and be in love with each other.
DH took a second job as a swimming coach (used to be his full time career, he loved it but was very taxing on the home life) and he now makes an extra $400 a month that we can tuck away. He may go back to his previous income but we'll still live this way.
I hate the big, greedy corporate bastards too but I know I can't control them. What I can control are my actions. We are no longer using CC (for years now), we are paying them off. When our Sprint contract expires in December we are going to an all pre-paid cell so we are not slaves to stupid contracts anymore.
We can't control the bigwigs, but we can change our life so we can get out of their web.

[NcsstyBrdsIngnty]

I have a doozie. It goes back a little more then two years, I hope you don't mind.

After years in a bad relationship with my daughter's father (which included living in a car and in motels for 6 months - we never asked for government help BTW), I left with my kiddo in tow and moved back in with my mom under the condition that I would be their maid until I could find a job and pay them rent/utilities/food money/etc. Within 2 months I went to a local construction company to ask for a job as a receptionist. During the interview they realized that while I had no formal training (high school graduate), I had ambition and the ability to use a computer. Instead of a receptionist position, they gave me one month to learn drafting software to make drawings for them and I spent nights and weekends working my butt off to learn it - netting about $40 a week after paying all of my bills/gas/child care to buy food and clothes with. After the month they kept me and I continued to work nights and weekends (although not as many) to keep myself in the position and keep my child fed.

Flash forward to now - after the construction company started to go down because of the housing crisis, I switched companies to an engineering firm that has plenty of work, and am paid somewhere between middle class and upper middle class wages. I also go to school part time at night to expand on the opportunities that have been given to me.

My opinion: Goonies never say die.

[Inkstain82]

In 2006, I left school and took a job making $12/hour as a sports copy editor for a fairly prestigious, but small, paper in Illinois. My wife worked part-time at a local deli and had some freelance reporting income, our combined income came to about $36k/year.

We were in debt up to our eyeballs and trying not to admit we were in trouble. We didn't feel like we lived extravagantly: two-bedroom apartment, eating out too much but nowhere expensive, two cars but we needed them, etc. We didn't have a formal budget, but we were definitely spending more than we made. Not a lot more, but it adds up. If your budget is $100 short one month, it'll be $200 short the next month. It snowballs, by late 2007 we were in deep trouble. I had a rotating "cash advance" on my checking account that basically had me paying 10% of my paycheck to them every two weeks to get the new advance. I was overdrafting constantly. Bills were starting to get months behind and we were dancing to keep utilities from being shut off.

Then in early 2008, as things were getting truly bad, my wife's mom, who had fibromyalgia, accidentally overdosed on pain medication. In order to visit her three hours away, we had to point the car toward my parents house (two hours out of the way) and pray we had enough gas in the car to get there, because we literally had no money or access to money. I had been paid that week, but it wasn't even enough to bring my checking account back to zero.

A few weeks later, I was laid off at the newspaper.

Finally, my father stepped in with some life-changing advice: Sometimes you have to admit defeat and regroup. I don't have an exact accounting, but I estimate at this point that we were about $55,000 in debt, including a few thousand in overdue, ordinary bills. The car was about to be repossessed, the gas was about to be shut off, etc. The checking account was several hundred overdrawn.

My first unemployment check, I didn't deposit it in my bank account, but instead cashed it at Wal-Mart. I used it to hold the bills at bay. I let them close the checking account with a negative balance.

I spent the next few months trying to find journalism work in an awful job market. As some of you may know, newspapers are in big trouble because the web has undercut advertising revenue (readership and circulation aren't actually the issue, it's that advertisers would rather buy cheap web ads). I ate homemade bread and other cheap food for virtually every meal. We didn't catch up much, but we didn't fall further behind either. I did a little freelance writing online for some extra cash when I could find it. My wife (also a reporter with daily newspaper experience) agreed that we'd both look for jobs and see who got one first, but she hated newspapers and hoped it was me.

In August of 2008, I finally found a job. It was for a tiny daily paper in Williston, North Dakota. The publisher tried to emphasize to me how truly rural this was, because they'd had problems with people getting out there and then quitting because they didn't like it. I'd lived in small Illinois towns all my life, but always within a couple hours of Chicago or St. Louis. This, she insisted, would be different. I took the job, at a starting pay of $10.80/hour. A lot of my newspaper friends sneered at why I would take such a low-level job.

It was the end of August, 2008, that we moved. We couldn't afford much with the move, it was going to be tight. My father borrowed a friend's trailer and loaded up most of our stuff to store in his garage. We only took with us what we could fit in our four-door Chevy Lumina, and that included two cats. To make matters worse, there was a major housing shortage in Williston because it's an oil-boom town. We'd be staying in hotels until we could find a place to live, and even then the hotel would be 40 miles away from town.

We got there on a Sunday night and I began to work the next morning. My parents had paid for the hotel through one week, and we had about $100. If we were very lucky, that would be enough to put gas in the car and buy some very cheap meals until I got my moving reimbursement, which I lobbied the company to give me as fast as possible. From there, it would be a game of chicken: How long could we afford to live in a hotel? A couple of weeks. If we didn't find an apartment by then (some people had been on waiting lists for months), we'd have to call friends and family to see if anyone could wire us enough money to get back to Illinois, and if anyone would let us live with them.

On Tuesday, the publisher informed me that the company had convinced a local landlord to hold the summer intern's apartment for them. It was only one bedroom (two rooms total) and a little pricier than I'd like, but we signed the lease site unseen the next day, putting down most of my moving reimbursement for the deposit.

By the end of the weekend, we were down to our last $5, but we'd moved in to the new place and my wife had started a job at Subway. That next Monday, one of their news reporters quit. The next day the company offered to hire my wife, who is also an experienced reporter, figuring it'd be cheaper than going through a search process (plus, she's better than anyone they would have had apply). She got paid the same as I did.

From August to December, that's where we were. It was tough sharing one car among two reporters, but we made it work. We used the envelope budgeting system, quite literally. We slept on an air mattress, we didn't have a TV or a couch, but we were able to put almost 50% of our income toward savings and debt repayment. First we were caught up on old bills. Then we were able to open a savings account (no checking, because we are now on that national list of people who have had checking accounts closed). Then we had more than a paycheck's worth in savings (hooray, no paycheck-to-paycheck living)!. The $X000 in savings milestones began to drop like flies.

On Dec. 24, we had a family meeting. We outlined our financial and personal goals for 2009, made up charts to keep our progress on things like weight loss, savings, hobbies acquired, etc. Three days later she began to suspect something, and four days later the pregnancy test was positive. She'd been off birth control for years, but we figured one of us had a problem because nothing was happening and we weren't in a financial position to have it checked out. We now suspect that it was just the stress of those bad finances, and with the stress relieved, voila.

We spent most of 2009 stockpiling cash and saving money. Patrick was born healthy and happy on Aug. 25, 2009. The bills related to that set us back a little, but we are still down to $48k in debt. We had more than enough cash savings to let my wife take her time returning to work with no problems, though she did have to quit the paper because the juggling of two reporters who can't be there at the same time because of a kid at home would be too tricky.

She was planning to take 12 weeks off, but she hates not working, so she's only made it through about nine. We still have a couple months' expenses in our savings, because we could almost afford to live on my paycheck alone. Wal-Mart offered her $10.20 an hour full-time to work the overnight shift, and she began last Tuesday. That's barely less than she made as a reporter, so we're ready to begin plowing ahead on those debts again. We think we can clear them all, including my student loans, within five years.

We do without some things. No TV, one cell phone between two adults and no landline. One car (will be paid off in December, seven months ahead of schedule), but we've got a little more furniture now. She's working the overnight shift because we don't want to pay for babysitting.

But I don't have to wait until payday to buy things we need, I don't stay awake at night wondering what I'd do if the car broke down. I'm well on the road to the freedom that financial security can bring. And I know that with my new perspective on what's a necessity and what's a luxury, I could live on almost any wage if need be.

[frugalfranny]

Also: I am pursuing legal action to get my bonus from the car dealership.

And I hope you get it daisygirl!!! YOU GO GIRL!

Gal I know lost her HUSBAND.....had 3 small kids...and the Co. was going to give her THREE DAYS bereavement leave!! She told them she didn't care if she got it or not.....she was taking it.

[ml2620]

I married a successful business owner in July of 2007, his business made about $250K that year, and while we did not lead a lavish lifestyle, I was looking forward to quitting my job and starting a family and living mortgage free very soon thereafter.

In telling this story and sharing numbers, I feel like I should add that we live right outside of Boston, MA. "In 2006, Essex County received the dubious honor of being named number one on Forbes Magazine's list of most overpriced places to live in the U.S. The magazine cited high living costs and expensive real estate as the major reasons Essex County was picked over cities with higher mean real estate values (San Diego, New York, Honolulu." (wikipedia)

Three months after the wedding, I discovered my husband had not paid his taxes in several years and the business books were an utter disaster. One year, and $45K in accountant, attorney and legal fees later, we got the final breakdown, $165K owed to the IRS.

Our attorney was concerned the IRS might eyeball the $85K I had saved over the years for a house and recommended we buy a house ASAP, better to be in a house with a lien on it than lose $85K, right? We closed three days after the financial meltdown in 2008 and purchased a farm that had been in my family for seven generations. And yes, we paid more than we could probably afford without regrets.

The relocation from the city to the country, and the collapse of the financial markets/real estate market crippled my husband's moving business. His business is on life support and he is essentially, unemployed.

But I've discovered reserved of strength and capabilities I never knew I had. We live comfortably on my $65K salary - no car loans, no credit card debt, just the mortgage and IRS debt. I pack my lunches, we carefully consider every purchase, grow our of vegetables and greatly enjoy a very fulfilling and happy life with less, less stuff and less money. I've gone from thinking of my work as a job - to truly having a career path, and a plan to climb the corporate ladder.

Our 3 bedroom home allowed us to welcome my MIL into our home as she was having her own financial troubles and had recently lost her husband after years of illness (and medical expenses). Living at our place cut her expenses by 80% each month, and she gives us a set small amount of money each month - which goes towards the IRS debt and sends the rest of her income to pay off debt).

I'm proud we came forward to the IRS about our debt, that we are getting by with so much less and are living happily without cc debt, without car loans and within our means (although the EF really needs some attention, and we do miss all the travel we used to do). With continued hard work, we will settle the IRS debt next year and move forward with a new mindset, new focus and new standards of living.

I work with the fatcats your cousin refers to. All I can say is they don't swim in our pool, and they don't live on our planet. They live for the money. I wouldn't trade their issues (multiple bad marriages, drug-addled children, crazy egos - affairs, various addictions and general bad behavior) for anything we have encountered in the last two years.

[Lora88]

Not my story but my sons Ds was working for the same company dh works for in 2008 Ds is very mechanically inclined and knows alot in Hvac field. I wanted him to go to college but the lure of the good money he was making kept him at the job. Well things fell apart and Ds was laid off last fall. This prompted him to see the light and he enrolled in college he was accepted for the PSeg program so in addition to regular college studies he is training for this company. Its a win win . Dhs company became busy again and ds picks up part time work there. I am so happy that the economy forced the layoff or he may never have gone to college

[shoiji]

I was working a full-time job and a part-time job. Then I became disabled. Lost my place and had to start all over again.

Fortunately I had worked at really good companies so I was able to get basically full disability. Yes living on a strict low-income budget can sometimes be wearing, with food, gas, electric, rent, prices rising. Oh yea, there won't be any increase in disability probably for two years. Sure, amount may not seem like alot but everything helps.

Am I worried. Somewhat, but I have gained many more skills to save money thanks to this website. I also know that many people are loosing their homes, worried about feeding their family, etc. Even with needing to pay more on less money I know I will be able to make ends meet. I have also taken it upon myself to buy yarn at the thrift store to make scarfs. My plan is to give them to a shelter. I find it empowering, that even though things might be tight, I can still help.

I could blame alot of things on the "fat cats". And quite frankly, they are accountable for alot of what is going on. But the reality is, I will never be a fat cat. Just the way life turns out. Most of us will be the "cogs". So it is up to me to be content and happy.