HUGE Budget Post: Final Work Day Announced, Our Debts, 401k questions, and Should We Consider Bankruptcy?

So, my boss sent out a heart felt email yesterday, letting us know he's got the budget to keep us through January 27th, but then that's it unless he finds enough for maybe one or two more shifts for someone. I've seen on the internal pages at work that they've already gotten with the new outsourcing company and getting ready to take over. It's all become very real.

I've been working on my resume. I had an old co-worker look it over, and he gave quite a few suggestions for changes, so guess I need to start over.  I don't even know what I want to do now. I'm fairly certain I'm going to just live on unemployment as long as I can.  I've earned it! I've never had to draw unemployment, and after all these years of working, I'm due. I don't relish the idea of the whole process of getting on it and all of that, but my husband was on it for a while, and he seemed fine.

They're opening a new Hobby Lobby, Marshalls, and Five Below all together in a strip mall here in town that just lost a KMart and JCPenney recently.  I think I'd like to hold out and work at one of those when they open, especially Hobby Lobby. But they've not really started on remodeling the buildings yet, and I don't know if they'll even be open in 2019. I hope so.

My husband is still working part time at a big retail store. He actually really loves it there.  The biggest issue is that he doesn't have a minimum number of days each each week. Some weeks he even gets scheduled 0 days, and he has to pick up shifts.  They have one of those apps that let you see available shifts and snag them.  My son has the same kind of thing at Applebees. At least my husband always works the same shift regardless of the day. He works 4am-1pm. It's actually very convenient. He's usually able to take our kid to the Dr appointments or run other errands since I sleep all day and would not have time to go get them done if he came home later. Of course, my sleep schedule *could* go back to normal after January 27th.

So, soon, we'll be without any insurance. No health, life, accidental, dental or vision. It'll be the first time since we were without it when my husband had his heart attack in 2006. The medical bills from that were well over $200,000 by the end of it, so we filed bankruptcy and ruined our credit for 10 years and tried to just live on my paycheck until he finally got better and got a good job. His dream job would be a stockroom manager at some store. He's not a people person at all, but he's had to be for years as a retail manager.  Now, he's just done with it.  He wants to just deal with stock and not have to deal with people any more. I totally get that.  We're both severe introverts.  He says he might some day go full time or get promoted at his work. I hope so.

So, we still have to deal with the here and now.  I have one more full paycheck left. Then if I'm lucky, 2-3 weeks later I'll start getting unemployment pay. If you've been following along, you know we already couldn't pay all of our bills every month.  In fact, this month, most of our debts didn't get any kind of payment at all. We were able to pay our "Four Walls" like rent, electric, water, internet, groceries, gas, my kid's school tuition, and the car payment.  I include the car payment, because we HAVE to have it for my husband to get to work and back. Thankfully we live about 2 miles from his work, and the car gets really good mileage, so we don't spend too much in gas.

We've made payment agreements with Discover card to pay $157/month that they take out automatically every month, and it keeps our % rate lower than normal since we filed a hardship case. We just refinanced two loans to get lower payments, and have to make those agreed payments to keep out of court since we'd let them go without paying before for so long. But we still have other smaller personal loans. Yes, we're stupid. We know.  We regret so so many things.  We continue to make the same mistakes.  We're both spenders. We are aware of these facts.  It has not changed anything though. We plan on keeping the car, so those payments also have to be made every month.

Without the car note, our total debt is approximately $36,600 which includes what we owe for 2 surgeries and a week long hospital stay for the kid. I just can't see filing bankruptcy again for that amount of debt. But the minimum payments are killing us.

Since I have no pride left, here's the full list (balances may be less than this if I made a payment since I wrote these down in my budget notebook):

Balance          Creditor                 Minimum Payment
$3006 - World Finance                    $165
$1590 - Credit Central #1                $125
$1000 - Credit Central #2                $100
$800 - Service Loan                         $100
$14,421 - One Main                         $239 (starting in Feb - had been $318) (I HATE this loan)
$1016 - Advance Financial              $250 ($125 on 15th and last day)
$2394 - Lendmark                            $99 (starting in Feb - had been $260)
$633 - Fortiva Card                          $60 (usually 30, but now $214 overlimit)
$777 - Credit One Card                    $138 (Card is $177 overlimit)
$3303 - Discover Card                     $157 (autodraft payment on hardship agreement)
$871 - Walmart Card                        $221 ( $171 over limit. account is now closed :(  )
$464 - Care Credit                            $42 (my daughter has been paying the minimum)
Not including the medical bills here, as they're mostly in collections and will just have to stay there until we're back on our feet.


I have talked to my husband and asked if he thinks we should take our tax refund and hire a lawyer to do bankruptcy anyway. He seemed ok with it, but he's also always for the easy way out.

The alternative is to use the tax refund and put $1000 in a money market account earning some interest as our emergency fund and then put the rest of it on getting caught up... but we still just don't make enough to meet all the minimums. What needs to happen is to pay off 1-4 of the smaller loans. I totally need to pay Advance Financial off asap. It's a cash advance thing adn the interest is astronomical. But I don't know how much our tax refund is going to be. I think it'll only be about $1600, which means after I pay off that cash advance loan, I only have $600 for the emergency savings and can't open a money market with 2.1% interest (best one I could find).

I think I can also get out my 401k though.  My husband got his when he quit his job. He had to pay penalties and taxes on it (which they took out of the total before they sent him the check) - we still have to get that tax info to file our taxes this year... so I am hoping it doesn't eat up our refund.  So, I get that it's costly, but I think right now, if I could get at that lump sum, it would help us be able to live on what we're making and not have to stress out anymore, and start actually *finally* doing a snowball to pay off the rest..  My current 401k balance is only $4541.78. My husband's 401k was about the same and I think our check for that was about $3000 after fees and taxes.

Okay, so if we get $1600 in tax refund and $3000 from 401k.  I put $600 in emergency fund and with the remaining $4000 pay the following:

$1016  - Advance Financial
 $800 -  Service Loan
$1000 -  Credit Central #1
 $777  - Credit One Card
 $407 -  Care Credit (almost pays off, and my daughter can finish paying off the rest since we let her use it to get her dog fixed)

That would take our minimum payments for debts from $1695/month to $1066/month and the Walmart minimum is not realistic because we're certainly not going to make that huge a payment on a closed account with so little income at this time.  So change the $221 for Walmart and pay like $25 on it, and the new minimums for the debts = $870. Almost half of what they had been.

So, let's see what the four walls usually come out to:

$160 - Rent
$45 - Water
$220 - Electric (usually a little less in summer)
$230 - Internet/Cable
$300 - Groceries (minimum amount - comes to $50/person/2weeks)
$40 - Gas (high estimate)
$20 - clothes (In case he needs work pants or new shoes or ruins his work shirts etc)
$49 - kid's tuition for online high school
$330 - Car Payment (only car)
$114 - car insurance
$20 -  household items like toilet paper, paper towels, detergent etc
$40 -  pet food, rabbit bedding, cat litter etc.
$80 - our phone minutes
$20 - toiletries             
$1668 - TOTAL Non Debt

$1668
+$870
$2538 = Possible New Outgoing


$1134 = Husband's possible Income per month if he gets two 3-day weeks and two 4-day weeks
$1400 = my possible unemployment if I get $350/week (no idea if I'll get that much)
$2534 = Total Possible New Incoming for as long as I get unemployment (if I even make that much per week)

So even then, after cutting our debt payments in half, we'd have to cut costs somewhere even more.  Get cheaper or less paper towels and detergent, pray there's a mild spring and summer and the electric bills stay low.  It also means, that hubby will need to get full time or I will have to eventually get a job bringing in at least $1400 after taxes. Around here, I don't see that happening. For me to not have to work at all, my husband would have to get a 40hr/week job making like $15.50 an hour. I can assure you. he'd much rather I get a $15.50/hr job so he didn't have to work. Those jobs just do not exist here without working in dangerous conditions in a factory or being upper management somewhere - or his old job. At his old job, he brought in $2100 a month after they took out medical, dental, vision, life, cancer and all the other insurances and stuff. I could get a little part time job to make up the rest. but even though the old district manager that bullied him into quitting has since retired himself (RIGHT AFTER HE MADE MY HUSBAND QUIT - YEAH I'M STILL PISSED OFF)- my husband refuses to try to get back with the company, even at a store closer to our house. His old one was 45 minutes away. With the way they need managers, I know they'd take him back. And they pay so well for store managers. But that damn asshole broke my husband.  Broke his spirit and his ability to deal with other humans.  I hope he is having a very horrible retirement.

So, there ya go. That's where we stand.  I hate it. I wish we'd never taken on all those loans.  They were all due to us being idiots and bad with money and being spenders instead of savers. I just feel so old and tired and depressed. I want it to just all go away. 


EDITED to add: I got the 99 cent domain name with a special at godaddy, so now MyChaoticHome.com will bring you to this blog!  And I'm going to try to figure out how to do videos that go along with my blog more, instead of just journal flip thrus. YouTube won't make me any money until I get 1000 subscribers, so that's probably not gonna happen, but I'd still like to have both the videos and my blog to document our lives and struggles and trying to make it every day in our new reality. I wish I had a good camera, a tripod and better lighting, but we'll just have to figure something out.