re: What was your worst time financially?

A stroke at the beginning of a pandemic and then rampant inflation has created a challenge

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I can’t help I’m the O-T boogeyman

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You misspelled irrelevant

Right now

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who would nearly always approve an overdraft.

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among the very many things that I do not have any desire to know is the amount of overdraft fees I have paid in my life. If would not surprise me if the total was well into five figures.

here’s another...remember those “checks” the credit card companies used to send out in the mail? Basically a loan shark loan at 30-40%

that’s how I paid my daughter’s tuition. Then start the game of minimum payments and moving balances. I keep very little from those days but I do have an old paper statement in my desk that I don’t look at but I know it’s there, just as a reminder.

and there was no silver bullet to get out. I ruined my credit and only a VERY empathetic mortgage lender kept me under a roof. I even had a repo man show up in my driveway once to give me 2 day notice on my truck

today I am 100% debt free. Never going back into debt for any reason

April 15th annually

I quit my job in April 2019 due to depression, alcoholism and cocaine addiction. By July 2020 I ran out of money. I was spending $6000 a month on cocaine alone. I very much resembled James Woods in the final scenes of The Boost. I went to a 90 day inpatient rehab. On August 1st I will have two years clean and sober and have returned to work.

In college I rolled pennies for gas, but it was also 71 cents per gallon.

I ate rice and beans, but I liked rice and beans. I drank cheap beer but I liked cheap beer. At the end of the day, I could still go home on a weekend and mom would send me back loaded down with groceries and dad would spot me some cash.

In 2007, I made the brilliant decision to get into the real estate biz, as BRAC was promising 10s of thousands of people to the area. It ended up taking many many years to materialize. We built a couple houses. I sold a couple houses, and I ended up doing anything I could to make ends meet from appraisals, property management, pressure washing driveways and houses...you name it. My wife was in grad school. We had a new house, and we had our first kid.

I ended up taking a job and re-entering the rat race, but it was 150-160 miles away. I commuted at first, but ended up living with a friend during the week for a few months, and driving home every weekend. My family moved up after a few months of that. Our 3-year old house would not sell. We rented and paid mortgage for 2 years. We had a renter, but they bailed and left us with damages to repair. We finally sold the house and I had to stroke a check for $11,000 to close the deal.

After those 2 years of rent, mortgage, gas (btw, this was 2008 when gas surged over $4/gallon. Remember that?). It wiped out all our savings. We racked up credit card debt. It was fricking awful and set us back a decade.

I often wish I was a piece of crap and had just walked away from the mortgage like so many others, but we never considered it.

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Had to borrow money from the GF

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which led to

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now wife

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find one that will love you broke.

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After my first divorce. She took the house, my dog and half of everything else.

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I've heard the new western woman mantra is "First marriage for money, second marriage for love."

If you're past two already, find a nice grad student to finance.