Seeking God Knows What

This is another rant about the poor state of our finances. If you do not want to read about how badly we have managed our money, you might as well skip this post….

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I hate that banks can process checks in the middle of the night when I can’t physically enter the bank and deposit money.

Case in point, apparently our rent check went through faster than usual and before they had processed T’s paycheck, (which comes by MAIL- an incredible anomaly considering the fact they are an IT business). Since we had no where near enough money in there, they bounced it and charged me $30 according to my web banking records. Now I’m praying that the bank will just reprocess the check on Monday since the deposit is there and not send it back to our landlord’s bank. If they do that, I have another $75.00 in fees to pay to our landlord.

I do not have an extra $75.00. In fact, I don’t even have the extra $30 the bank charged me. I just sat down to do our bills/budget for the rest of the month and we are still short because of all these stupid extra things. We have no room for extra bills, like the bill that showed up for the deductible from the hospital for an urgent care visit we made earlier this spring after Widget got her 3 middle fingers pinched in a very, very heavy wooden door in a restaurant and that was only the radiology bill (where the radiologist asked if she had gotten her thumb pinched too because she “saw” something there, her thumb was fine).

This is on top of having to pay my entire bill due to our old gas company, when they failed to tell me that I had to pay the first payment within 4 days of setting up a payment plan for the giant final bill, otherwise they drop the plan and refer you to collections. I paid that first payment within a week. And then started getting calls from the collections people the next week asking when I was going to pay the rest of the bill. They called everyday, acting like they were someone I knew/wanted to talk to when they called, DESPITE the fact their number showed up as unavailable,

“Hello?”

“Is Erin there?”

” Speaking”

“Hi, Erin. How are you? Are you having a good day?”

“Not since you called.”

” This is so & so from old gas company collections people. I was wondering when you would be paying the rest of your bill. Tomorrow? Can I put down that you are paying the bill in full tomorrow?”

“No. Do you have a payment plan?”

“No, we do not. Bill must be paid in full. And we will call every day until it is paid.”

“Oh for pete’s sake, I’ll put a check in the mail Friday and THANK YOU for using my cell phone minutes up with your pestering.” (This was after they had called me every day for two weeks.)
They called me on Friday to verify that I was, in fact, putting the check in the mail that day.

I really hate to say it but I’m truly beginning to think that if we don’t file for bankruptcy, we may never get out of this mess. It is like a sinkhole and all the scrabbling we do to get up the sides ends up just burying us further. I know that if we can get out of this hole, we would be fine financially, but at the moment, it feels like it is pouring financial crises on us. I’m feeling very discouraged by the whole thing and very guilty for the mess we are in.

Plus it worries me about our future ability to adopt, if we have the black mark of bankruptcy on our credit.