Seeing news daily about folks stung by drastic wage cuts, fending off foreclosure, paying more for everything, drowning in credit-card debt and hanging dwindling hope on Uncle Obama, a thought comes to mind:
Hey, that's me!
Then comes a question: Why not blog about it? Then an answer: Um . . . okay. I'll lay out my situation in this first post. I'll return with new posts from time to time. Please chime in with advice, complaints, sympathy, ridicule or your own mucked-up circumstances so we can cry in our Schlitz together.
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My wife and I have always lived paycheck to paycheck. As our income rose, so did the bills. But we
always managed to stay current. I left the Weekly in
April '07 to take a job that paid me slightly more than I had been
making and had me living in Sacramento during the week. I flew home on
weekends. For the first six months, my new company picked up the
airfare, my housing, my utilities and even ground transportation to and
from the airport. When that expired, first my grown daughter and then
my wife moved up to live with me in rental housing, while my two grown
sons and some friends rented our Costa Mesa home from us.
Fortunately, my wife continued working for her OC employer from
Sacramento.
Then things got squirrelly. Despite the expenses my employer had picked
up, there were the unexpected incidentals that come with frequent travel and maintaining a home and rental. Once the expense account
ran dry, much that
shouldn't have wound up on plastic and was carried over from month to month at huge
interest rates. Then things got even more squirrelly. I was fired in May '08. We moved
back to Costa Mesa, the boys moved out and my daughter had already
moved to England. Once my measly severance ran out, I went on
unemployment for a couple months. Job prospects in the print media
business were almost as dreary then as they are now. The state
suggested I contact my previous employers. The Weekly was hiring. I
applied, met with editor Ted Kissell and was thankfully offered my
current position.
I am forever grateful to the Weekly, but while I make more than
unemployment paid, our total income is about a third less of what it had been for years. Now we can only pay deferred
interest on the mortgage. Credit-card payments are being juggled to the
extent that we are getting hammered with late fees, insufficient fund
fees and over-the-credit-limit fees. We went to a reputable debt
consolidation company, but the program did not seem to offer much than what we did on our own: get some creditors to suspend accounts, waive fees and cut
percentage rates to help us afford to pay down debt–so long as we
remain current.
We continue to cut and scale back anywhere we can, with more
to come. We can't turn our cell phones in until May. Our car lease does
not expire until the end of summer. My wife has taken on two more jobs
(that's three total) while finishing a college course she hopes will
result in more pay at one of them. I've had no luck finding part-time
work. (Sorry, Senator McCain, I'm trying.) We're edging by just enough
to stay current and keep black marks off our credit but not enough to
stop the annoying phone calls from bill collectors. The things that
kills us are property taxes, prescriptions, car insurance, medical
co-pays, grocery bills, other things I'm forgetting and whatever unexpected that may be lurking around a corner.
Our home lender said they had a new program for borrowers like us who
need help. We applied, got an appraisal–and just learned this week we
had been rejected because our debt-to-value ratio is way too high.
Before being informed of this, a recording heralded a new federal
government program available for homeowners in trouble. When I asked about this, I was told
we would not qualify with such a high debt-to-value ratio. “Don't
worry,” he said, “no one in California can qualify.” (Um … yay?) My
only option, I asked, is to continue paying what I can't afford? “You can wait and
see if the government comes up with another program,” I was told before
the “buh-bye.”
That's not fair, he did refer me to a loan
counselor. First we're going to check out another bank's offer and if
that does not work it's either the counselor or a bankruptcy attorney. Unless someone out there has a better idea.
I've already
ruled out faking my own death so my wife can collect on the insurance I can't afford.

OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.