Your law date is the day the police can kick you and your stuff to the curb. 

            A smart soon-to-be-homeless person like you will implement a plan for managing the strategic time between now and your law date. Here’s what your plan should include:

            Up your alcohol consumption – if you’ve been drinking wine or beer, now’s the time to switch to martinis or whiskey straight from the bottle. You’d better buy the generic brands, because you’re broke, but make sure you have plenty of booze on hand — you want to maximize the time you spend blotto. While you’re at the store, you’d better buy some aspirin too.

            Teach your kids how to fix a martini. Because you’re going to be too blotto to fix your own. Remind them not to forget the olives – that’s your dinner!

            Alienate your friends and family.  If you’ve been nursing a grievance for a while, now’s the time to bring it up. After all, they’re not really helping you, or, if they are, they’re doing it in an insulting way, i.e., taking advantage of your situation to waggle their fingers at you and tell you everything you’ve ever done wrong. So, go ahead and tell them what you really think of them.

            Go to church and say, “Enough with all the goddamn prayers. What I really need is a place to watch television.”

            Re-evaluate your priorities. Is it 1) money 2) television and 3) martinis or should it be 1) martinis 2) money and 3) television?

            Re-think your New Year’s Resolutions. Did you decide to give up smoking? Drinking? Bad decision.

            Put on a good show. People love to watch a train wreck, so do what you can to make your crisis as enjoyable as possible for others. Here’s a suggestion: next time you’re sobbing uncontrollably into your martini glass, have your kids shoot a video and post it on YouTube.

            Tell your kids that you’re modeling “real world” adult behavior – and that they’d better shut the fuck up and deal with it.

            Find new ways to humiliate yourself.  You’ve already asked your pastor, your local social services agency and various charities for help. You’ve humbled yourself to your family and former friends. Perhaps you’ve even written your congressman (excuse me while I have a little laugh at your expense). Now’s the time to place an ad in your local paper begging and pleading for a reasonably priced place to stay or offering to assist an elderly or disabled person in exchange for a place to live.

            Listen to the deafening silence in response to your ad.

            Ask for a raise/look for a job. All those extra NOs can really help push you over the edge.

            Tell your kids it’s all their dad’s (or mom’s – whichever one is your ex) fault.

            If you need to, bust up some stuff. Smash a mirror with a shoe, that sort of thing. Who cares? You’re going to lose it all anyway.

            Apply for lots of credit cards.  Hopefully you’ve already done this, but if you haven’t, then get your ass in gear and start applying. These will be useful later, for groceries and etc., but, what the hell, it’s also important to use them to make yourself feel better right now. Buy that new coat, or that pair of shoes you’ve been eying. Replace that mirror you threw a shoe at. You only live once!

            Indulge in a little Schadenfreude. If you’re feeling blue, read about Haiti or some other disaster, and feel glad that at least you’re not there.

            Buy a gun . . .just in case.

I finally decided that I could no longer afford my $160 per month Cablevision bill, for internet, phone and television — I had some premium movie channels, but not all the premium movie channels.

I need the Internet to work and the phone to make me a legitimate human who can be contacted by schools and whatnot, but television? That I could do without.

I had lived without a television for years in my younger, single days in Manhattan. I read books and magazines, listened to music, went out with friends. I don’t remember missing it.

So I called Cablevision to cancel my television. I explained to the customer service rep that I would be moving in a few months, that my bill was too high and that I wanted the television service removed entirely.

He was shocked. He asked me if I had kids, and when I said yes he said, “Maybe you can live without the TV, but what about your kids?”

Of course, he was trying to prevent the loss of all of my business. He offered to downgrade me, getting rid of premium movie channels, but I still insisted on hearing what the price would be for no service at all versus the “family” service he was recommending, since I need to save as much money as possible.

He explained the differences, exclaiming periodically with emotional incredulity, “You have to think of your kids.”

I’ve had a semi-antagonistic attitude towards TV for my whole adult life — sort of like an ex-drinker has about a nice crisp martini. I’ve told my children they’re not allowed to watch TV at all during the week and I limit their TV on weekends (when they were younger they weren’t allowed to watch commercial TV at all – a restriction that’s become impossible to enforce). All of these limitations, and yet, on a bad day, I’ve been known to sit drooling in front of the thing for hours. Especially with the movie channels (I love movies). Television has made me a hypocrite.

Could my children really live without iCarly, The Simpsons, American Idol, Hannah Montana (ugh!), Phineas and Ferb, America’s Next Top Model (double ugh), Family Guy, South Park? (I would miss those last two).

My ten-year-old son attends a boarding choir school in Manhattan, and they watch no TV at all, only a movie on Friday nights. So he loves to plop down in front of the thing when he’s home. But he survives all week without it and seems to actually be happy.

I felt we could all, in fact, survive without it.

But the guy convinced me, through various financial incentives, to keep the cable box and the basic family channels. That way we should still have the History channel and National Geographic and the Science channels that the kids actually enjoy — and that I think aren’t going to turn their brains into mush. I’ll save fifty dollars a month, and if I need to save more I’ll cancel the rest.

My situation is due to an ex-husband who didn’t keep up his end of the Divorce Agreement - something that has happened to a lot of people I’m sure. He actually stopped paying my mortgage in January of 2007 - months before the financial crisis hit everyone else. I had an early financial crisis.

In fact, the nationwide crisis actually helped me - it overshadowed my personal crisis and my mortgage was lost for a while in the onslaught.

A lawyer friend also helped me forestall the crisis for a while. So I’ve been living for three years now knowing that my two children and I could be evicted any time.

I now have a firm date: May of 2010. Despite all the extra time, during which I finished graduate school and looked for a job, my financial situation hasn’t much improved. My ex-husband, prince that he is, is in prison now for embezzlement and fraud so there’s no help coming from there. People don’t seem to be lining up to hire  a47-year-old women, astonishingly enough. Despite my super amazing credentials.

I made the difficult decision to send my nine-year-old son away to a choir boarding school - through a serendipitous series of events, his talent was discovered and he auditioned and was accepted. I would never have sent him if we had been secure financially. Interestingly, he loves his choir boarding school (in Manhattan) and it has enriched all of our lives - we live in a wealth of music and wonderful people at the St. Thomas Church in New York.

There are exceptional details in everyone’s situation. Our relationship to the choir school is pretty unique, and it has also created restrictions - we cannot move too far from Manhattan,because we want to be near my son –and yet living near Manhattan is expensive.

But many can’t imagine what foreclosure is really like. Four years ago I never would have dreamed that I’d be in this situation. Here’s what I can tell you about it:

Enduring an impending foreclosure, combined with not knowing where you’ll go and how you’ll get there and how you will care for your kids, is excruciating.

People/churches will bring you cooked meal or offer help if you are bereaved, but they dismiss financial difficulties. They don’t want to know and they can’t help. It’s embarrassing for them. (I was so tempted to stand up in church one Sunday during “Joys and Concerns” and say, “I am concerned. My ex-husband won’t be paying any child support because he’s in prison for twenty months. And my kids and I will be evicted from our home in May,” but I didn’t have the nerve and I don’t think it would have gotten a good reaction.) I’ve even had a psychologist deny that my problems are real: “Oh, that won’t really happen,” one of them said when I told her about my foreclosure.  Say what?

If you had had your house stolen or all your money taken by someone like a robber or, say, a Bernie Madoff, people would sympathize. But if you are in your bad situation because of an abusive spouse, as I am (my ex-husband stole my money and left me bankrupt too — it’s legal to steal from your spouse), then people don’t conceive of you as a victim but, rather, as a fool who deserves her comeuppance.

Likewise, if you are having difficulties, whether it is your fault or not, people feel free to criticize you, especially if they have done something to help. There’s something about being down and out that inspires others to censure. I have had this experience confirmed by friends who’ve suffered their own difficulties — they tell me that they also dealt with additional gratuitous criticisms from people (change your hair; your car is not appropriate; you should not be going to grad school; you should get a job as a secretary) and that the criticisms ended when their situations improved.

Living with an impending foreclosure is like having PTSD - with nightmares and the rest.

It’s socially isolating. People don’t really want to hang out with someone who’s losing her home - what can you do about it? Say, gee, sorry, and I am having a really hard time deciding where to vacation this year? Feel obligated to help somehow - yet how? It’s too immense.

And yet there are the people who pitch in and help in surprising ways. Some anonymously. Someone was sending me $50 bills for a while — I never learned who it was. I applied for a grant and was awarded $2,500. Sometimes people help by doing work, like my lawyer friend Ellery Plotkin of Stamford, who won me a couple of extra years, and Herb Kolodney, of Computerdocs.biz, who has helped me with computer problems gratis. And it’s little things, like people taking you out to dinner . . . it’s surprising how rarely I go out to dinner.

As the New Year rings in, I have no idea where or how I’m going to move my family. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for it. I’ll keep you posted.

Photo by Nick Bastian Tempe, AZ

So it was a bit of a surprise to me when I first moved to Darien, Connecticut and I had to figure out myself how to dispose of my trash.

That was long ago. I was married and, I thought, prosperous. We hired a firm to collect our garbage, provided them with a bin of household waste and a bin of recyclables and that was that. Just like we had a guy to mow the lawn and a lady to clean the house and another guy to come and fix the toilet if it broke – one of those things you take for granted.

Eight years and one expensive divorce later, I was still paying sixty dollars a month to have my garbage collected. The lawnmowing guy and the cleaning lady and the plumber are long gone. My guy from Darien Disposal Service still crept up twice a week to dispose of our trash – he is one of the most reliable and most considerate and yet most invisible men in our lives. I even wrote a poem about him.

You can imagine with what regret I had to tell Darien Disposal Service not to send my trusty garbage man any longer, that I would be hauling my garbage myself to save the lousy $60 each month.

I thought with trepidation about the difficulties I may encounter hauling my own garbage. I don’t have a garbage disposal in my kitchen so my garbage will be full of sloppy, wet discarded food. I would have to invest in some heavy-duty garbage bags to put my normal-duty kitchen garbage bags in to prevent accidents.

And my car – my thriftiness may turn out to be misguided if one of my garbage bags rips and spills in my car.

I went to Town Hall to purchase my first ever town garbage dump pass. Luckily for me, the annual cycle of garbage stickers expires June 30, so I was able to get a discounted sticker ($34 rather than $110 per year) because I have been using a commercial service already this year.

I stuck the sticker in my car and then I went on a tour of the Dump with the Public Works Committee for an article I was writing for a local newspaper. I was wondering, while there, how would I have figured all this out without the tour?

I learned that the Dump is a hotbed of all sorts of activity (political, physical, social) so perhaps my garbage hauling will involve some adventures. I hope they will not be of the garbage-hauling rage sort, but rather the garbage-hauling camaraderie sort.

Now I go two or three times a week to the dump to toss my garbage. I’ve run into old acquaintances there. If the dump is closed I put the bag in a plastic bin in the back of my car. I don’t forget about it because it SMELLS. The Thanksgiving turkey leftovers were quite a treat to drive around with.

One more little chore to add to the queue, which includes dealing with collection agency bureaucrats, fuel oil assistance bureaucrats, student loan bureaucrats, two children, bills, work, vacuuming and so on.

Imagine the stoicism and self-sufficiency that a child will develop when he has to cope with a toilet that never flushes properly. A toilet like our upstairs toilet — when the apparatus that flushes it broke for the third time I gave up trying to repair it. I took the cover off the toilet tank as a warning not to use it. But then my children and I realized that we could reach into the tank, down through the cold water to the bottom and lift the flapper, or rubber plug, to evacuate the bowl. Who needs a lever? Out of necessity ingenuity is born! Eventually I brought up a stainless steel pasta ladle — yet another innovation! We could use the ladle to lift the flapper up and flush the toilet, keeping our hands warm and dry. After years of adversity my children are undisturbed by the taken-apart toilet; they adapt quickly to any innovation. My daughter Charlotte, twelve years old, woke me up early one morning to tell me that the toilet water wouldn’t stop running after she’d flushed it. “Turn off the water,” I muttered, rolled over and went back to sleep. When I got up the water valve to the toilet was shut off, my youthful feminine plumber having remedied the situation solo.

Imagine the lessons that can be learned by having your downstairs toilet erupt like a geyser when you turn on your washing machine! I have to tell you that such an event is of utmost fascination to children, especially boys. After watching the burbling geyser, my children got to enjoy watching me finally call in a plumber, negotiate a price, give up on that plumber (who was damn surprised, he thought it was an emergency and that I’d pay anything), and then call another plumber, using some unusual (well, perhaps not so unusual) vocabulary in the process. They got to watch the plumber perform something like a colonoscopy to extract the guck from the main intestine of the house — the four inch pipe from house to sewer. He drilled in with a metal tube, bringing up tree roots and other things unspeakable.

A house’s plumbing is similar to a human’s digestive system — both bring in fresh, clean water and expel filth. The condition of a house’s plumbing reflects its owners perhaps more than any family photographs or tasteful décor. Our plumber observed sewage and other gunk which his giant tube collected and then spurted out into our garage. No amount of Mr. Clean is able to remove the smell. With his thick, latex-gloved fingers our plumber unwrapped butt wipes and sanitary-napkin pads from his muddy-looking drill pipe. Our house’s disgusting offal was our own disgusting offal. He told me that Nothing But Toilet Paper Should Go In The Toilet, and that even those products that advertise they are flushable are not flushable, much less the lady’s products that don’t claim to be flushable. I had to pass this information on to my daughter, who nearly perished with embarrassment.

Leaky faucets and slimy showers that don’t drain properly – no biggie! Such things are de rigueur at our house.

At least until my ten-year-old son had an inspiration one day. Having seen An Inconvenient Truth (and been more frightened by that than some other movies I don’t want to tell you I let him see), my son was disturbed by the leaking water. Hearing the drip drip drip of our kitchen faucet was like listening to Al Gore berate us. My son had some sort of epiphany, and he took a rubber band and wrapped it around the faucet handle, tethering it to the faucet. The leaking stopped.

Has your ten-year-old kid fixed your faucet lately? If not, perhaps you should abandon some of the soccer and basketball and use some of my Adversity Parenting techniques. Subject your kids to some bad plumbing. You never know what qualities, hidden in your kids, will be revealed.

During our marriage my husband used my money and credit to finance his business, or rather our family business, which he worked at while I raised babies. I did my share of working for it too.

When I asked for a divorce, he stayed home to torment me full-time and let the business fail, stiffing lots of vendors for lots of money.

I had to declare bankruptcy when we got divorced. He didn’t. Our two cars were in my name; we turned them in and I got an economy car and he got a new Porsche.

Since the divorce my husband has continued to threaten me financially. If I wouldn’t let him stay at my house sometimes he wouldn’t pay child support. Things like that. When he finally was arrested for embezzlement/fraud and all of his assets were seized, he told me that in order to make any money before he went to prison (it took a long time - first he was under investigation, then he pled guilty, then a wait before sentencing, then a few more months before he reported for prison) he would need to use my name and bank account in order to sell things on ebay.

Ok, you’re thinking, she must be crazy to give him that information. But what is a person to do who is trying to raise two kids on very little funds? I was duly alarmed, but I did it anyway, trying constantly to get information from him about what he was doing, and he did occasionally sell things and give us money. I believed that he wanted to do what he could for his kids. But I know you must know how fraught I felt about the whole thing.

Well, I was right to be alarmed. I still get regular reminders of the ex-husband through collection notices from various agencies, in my name and in my children’s names, if you can believe. I got one in my twelve-year-old daughter’s name yesterday for $37. I got a scary one a couple of weeks ago in my name for nearly $1,500.

Now I have a new employer, an actual paying freelance gig, who wants to pay me using Paypal. I felt dread even contemplating pursuing this. When I tried to get into my Paypal account my password, phone number and everything were all messed up. I summoned up the courage to call Paypal and they told me that I was permanently barred from using their service. Permanently. The ex had apparently tied my name and account to all sorts of fictitious accounts. And he owes money on these accounts.

I asked Paypal whether it would help my situation if I filed a police report; the answer was yes. It’s a case of identity theft, sort of. I had given him permission to use my name, but then he used it in ways that I hadn’t given him permission for. I do want to say, so you won’t think I’m a total idiot, that it didn’t take me long to stop cooperating with him and ask him to stop using my name. I stopped responding to his requests for me to reinstate the Paypal accounts, when the Paypal accounts kept needing to be reinstated. This was a major clue for me that things weren’t kosher. But I guess I was too late. The ex has probably destroyed my credit again as well.

So file the police report I did, but the collection agencies are still harassing me. And they are so pleasant and charming . . . NOT! They assume I’m the dirt bag, despite the police report, which they have. Plus, they are clearly not the most intelligent people on earth. If they get you on the phone, part of the process is that they want to berate you for a while. You must listen to the berating before you can actually exchange any relevant information, such as the fact that there is a man (a friend of the ex) who called them a month and a half ago offering to pay the debt, a fact which they never followed up on or shared with me, and which they are for some reason angry with me about. And if you don’t submit to this arbitrary berating and doublespeak, they threaten you with credit reports.

I have had the issue of identity theft with my husband before. During our lovely divorce, he called America Online, told them he was me (my username was gender-neutral, almost), got my password, and raided my emails. My divorce lawyer spent some time (and lots of my money) investigating whether this was criminal identity theft. Nothing ever really came of it. (The husband had also thoroughly gone through my computer, finding my journals - I have always written - deleting parts that made him look bad and using parts that made me look bad as evidence. As a writer, it is devastating to lose your writings, not to mention the violation of having your private thoughts used against you.)

Although my ex has already begun his career of using our daughter’s name on the Internet. God help us when he is released from prison!

I know, I’m a fool. But what do you do when you’re facing poverty and homelessness? When you’re desperate for money and the person who is supposed to be providing it and who seems to love his kids in his own way is in trouble and says he will only be able to contribute if you cooperate? If you’re a moral person it’s hard to understand someone with no moral compass.

If I had been able to find a real full-time job with real benefits, I wouldn’t have had to continue to rely on the criminal ex. And I think my credentials and experience ought to be good enough for me to get a good job. My conclusion: single mothers of a certain age are discriminated against in the employment market. This is also a healthcare issue, since how many employers want to hire a 47-year-old woman and have to pay insurance for her and her two kids?

In the meantime, there are a lot of things I’m supposed to be doing. Working, writing articles, my internship at The Paris Review, vacuuming. I can tell you, though, that when you’re financially stressed, and when you’re being harassed by collection agencies, and bills you can’t pay are piling up and you’re worried about where you’ll go with your kids after your foreclosure, it can be very difficult to keep at it. The phone and the mailbox and the email - it’s all bad news. Now I know why people stay in bed and eat ice cream all day.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/financialstress/2009/11/30/identity-theft-in-the-family/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/financialstress/2009/11/09/what-did-my-divorce-cost/ http://thefastertimes.com/financialstress/2009/11/09/what-did-my-divorce-cost/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:49:43 +0000 Kathryn A. Higgins http://thefastertimes.com/financialstress/?p=29

Our “civil justice” system is a mess, and my divorce is a perfect example.

As the “breadwinner,” my husband was not required to show his expenses, while, as the financial supplicant, I had to show everything. Thus I am not permitted to know exactly what my divorce cost. I don’t know what he paid his lawyers or the kids’ lawyers. Never mind that he financed his business was financed with my savings and good credit. Or that I owned half of it, since it was a family business.

He stopped working when I asked for a divorce. Working at our family-owned company. If it were a public company, he would have been fired. And probably sued by shareholders for putting an investment at risk.

Instead, he stayed home and tormented me full-time with complete impunity.

Meanwhile, my lawyer advised me to keep my expenses UP during this whole process, because supposedly whatever settlement we would reach would be a result of my expenses, not our family income from our family business — which my husband was busy destroying. So, knowing that things were perilous, I kept my expenses up per my lawyer.  Meanwhile, my soon-to-be-ex-husband was busy spending on private investigators and plane trips and…God knows what else, because I don’t.

What a fiasco! Now I am bankrupt and my ex-husband is in prison. Not for anything he did to me (it’s legal to steal from your spouse), but for his post-divorce embezzlement schemes.

When our mediation process and then our collaboration process fell apart, my litigation attorney demanded that I agree to a) supply him with psychological evaluations because my husband was saying I was crazy and he was worried about taking me on as a client and b) pay him with money I had saved in a 401(k) before marriage.

So I raided my 401(k) to pay my lawyer. This should have been paid back by my husband. And, in fact, when I took him to court during the divorce (which is called “ad litem”)  because he wasn’t paying the stipulated temporary child support and alimony payments, his lawyer used the Kathryn’s-expenses-are-scrutinized-whereas-husband’s-are-not scenario by questioning individual expenses of mine. With all the $450+ per hour attorneys present my husband’s lawyer subjected me  to a barrage of questions in Court about an item in my bank statement, “Blue Line Spirts,” which was an expense of about seven dollars. I didn’t remember what Blue Line Spirts was. His lawyer was trying to imply that I had bought alcohol. This seven dollar charge would prove that I was an alcoholic.

It turns out that it was socks I had bought for my son for his hockey practice at the Darien Ice Rink’s sports shop, Blue Line Sports.

The judge got so disgusted with my husband and my husband’s sophistic lawyer that he ordered the lawyer to reimburse me a representative portion of the fines and penalties from my 401(k) withdrawal. My lawyer and I had expected to cover this during the actual divorce, but the judge was so disgusted that he went off the schedule.

Of course, my husband never actually paid this money.

As I sit here, bankrupt and in foreclosure, I still get a $50,000 bill from my divorce lawyer every month.  Past due.

So to recap the costs (at least the ones I can recover), I come out a financial loser:

Mediating Lawyer: $4,000
Collaborating Lawyer (mine): $10,000
Litigating Lawyer (mine):  $140,000
Guardian ad Litem (kids’ lawyer):  [information withheld]
Collaborating lawyer (his):  [information withheld]
Litigating Lawyer (his):  [information withheld]
Criminal Lawyer (his): [information withheld]
Bankruptcy Lawyer (mine):  $1,200
Private Investigator (his):  [information withheld]
Business Evaluators:  $20,000

What’s it worth to be divorced, anyway?

Having decided to take time off to parent my babies (a priceless time, and yet a job with built-in obsolescence), and then with the financially catastrophic divorce and deadbeat ex-husband, I find myself adrift in a world where my skills (my own unique brand of parenting, grammar & punctuation, a somewhat scatological sense of humor) aren’t very valued. And yet, in my career as a Poor Person, I have developed an expertise in How to Get Help When You’re Down and Out, and now I will share my expertise with you. Let’s see if you respect me when I’m done!

Before I begin I  want to warn you: be ready to do a lot of paperwork, fill out a lot of applications and copy a lot of tax returns and paystubs. Keep all your financial records! But when you go, humbly, to seek assistance, do not expect to be treated badly. Quite the contrary.

The road to help begins at the Social Services office of your city. I can’t remember which occasion in my crisis first sent me to my Town Hall, but many of my recommendations came from discoveries I made there.  People in this line of work will help you through the maze of options and applications.  In my town (and hopefully in your town) they have supplies of sundry items: laundry detergent, shampoo, toilet paper and the like, and they’ll give you a bunch in a bag if you’re in need. Some come up with school supplies, holiday gifts, even a turkey. They organize their efforts to help with discretion and privacy in mind.

Another resource can come from local charities.  Person to Person got a lot of my castoff clothes and food in happier times, and has given me groceries on more than one occasion. Its Thanksgiving turkey was truly festive: it came on a rack, surrounded by all kinds of fixins and side dishes, wrapped up in cellophane with a bow, with a home-baked pie alongside. When I saw all of this I cried. Charities’ staffs know how to make you feel loved, and many soup kitchens or food pantries in cities of all sizes employ experts who will help you find jobs, prepare resumes and organize your money. The YMCA or its equivalent can give you “scholarships,” ie freebies, for classes or kids’ camp. So can some towns. If you have the means now to support local charities, you should. They’ll cover you when you’re cold.

The government can help too. My Social Services ladies helped me apply for the state-funded Neon fuel assistance program. I spent all winter on a bureaucratic circuit — my oil company would call me to let me know a delivery was due, I would have to call Neon and ask them to fax (!) the oil company an authorization- but everyone was nice about the exchanges and I stayed (mostly) warm.

I already devoted an entire blog to Medicaid health coverage, but it’s another government service worth mentioning. So is the school lunch program- which cuts back on choices and sticks a kid with the “hot meal” that my daughter says draws pretty universal scorn at her cafeteria. This leads to some humiliation for a 12-year-old, especially when she tries for a sandwich and the chorus of lunchtime staff announces: “You can’t get that! That’s not part of the free lunch!” I had to remonstrate with the lunch people (more than once) to let her pay for something else if she didn’t want the free lunch. I tried to get the money for my daughter to choose her lunch — this is one of those areas where you do what you can because you don’t want your circumstances to overly affect your child.

Personally, I found support in my church. When my divorce got ugly, the director of my kids’ nursery school at the First Congregational Church took me to meet the minister there. He consoled me and I began attending church. It was a great church for me – liberal and open-minded. Although I don’t have much in common with the rich, married congregation at my church I still feel a sense of community there. I was able to volunteer and contribute in various ways — always a good thing- and connect my family to inexpensive or free activities.  My kids got a week on a lakeside via a “scholarship” to our church camp. I had my children join the cute little junior choir -  free, taught by a funny, gracious man, and the one activity that my kids were never reluctant to attend. After a couple of years, the choir director suggested my son audition for the St. Thomas Choir School in New York. We did that and he got in and now we go to St. Thomas Church in Manhattan every weekend to see my son sing.

I will devote another blog to this amazing church and choir, but who would have thought that such a wonderful thing would have come out of all the crap I was living through?

Finally, I’m glad I started studying when I was poor- and not just because it started me toward learning some of those skills most people my age seem to have. It may seem counter-intuitive, but if you can get into school with the goal of improving your situation, your tuition will usually include health insurance coverage. You can use student loans to cover the tuition. I had to work part-time to make ends meet as well. Apply for any scholarship you can (yes, lots more paperwork — the college can help you learn about scholarships). After being accepted to grad school, I had to decide whether to attend right when my ex-husband got caught in financial shenanigans and stopped paying my mortgage.  I wasn’t sure if I’d be broke and homeless before I graduated. But I made it through. I’m glad I decided to go, although my student loans are about coming due and so I’ll have to see how I feel about it then. I was able to make it through two years of grad school before my house got foreclosed. Luck?

I think of it as something more complicated, and more strategic. And I thank all the people and institutions who helped me when I needed it.

My nine-year-old son did suffer one illness - plantar warts on his foot. Not alarming, you think? This is a garden-variety, very contagious kid ailment that needs to be handled - my son was in pain and limping. He had to go for several visits to the doctor and have nitrogen sprayed to freeze and kill the warts. Each visit, after the insurance company paid their piddling share, cost me another $100 or so. A couple of warts and I’m out about $350.

My own health care was a different story. Despite my work experience before having children, and my volunteer work while raising children, and my diligent searching, I was unable to find a reasonable full-time job with benefits (by reasonable, I mean a job commensurate with my skills as opposed to, for example, working at WalMart). Plenty of people would hire me for freelance work or temp work with no benefits. So I had to go without health insurance for a while. I went for years without going to the dentist; this caused me some serious (and expensive) problems later. When I was accepted to grad school and had to make the decision whether to go, the health insurance that was included with the tuition (which was paid with student loans) was a major incentive to say yes.

Meanwhile, the stress of my abusive marriage and divorce and resulting financial situation was manifesting in some physical ailments. All of my exercise and dietary efforts weren’t helping. I had a stress pain going up my neck that had me practically paralyzed. I was anxious and depressed. What a relief when I started school and suddenly had health care again. I got all my annual exams and was referred to a chiropractor who cured my pain.

Then the ex-husband was indicted for fraud and my children’s insurance, lousy as it was, was in jeopardy. I applied for Connecticut’s Husky health insurance (you can’t imagine how much time I spend filling out paperwork because of poverty - a full-time job). A few months later, a package arrived in the mail saying  that we had all qualified for the Medicaid insurance, and thank God, because I was graduating and losing my health insurance. This was a surprise to me, as I hadn’t even applied for it for myself. They just gave it to me.

I called them and said, “What does this mean? We all have insurance? I hadn’t even applied for it for myself.” I was dumbfounded by the idea of the State actually paying our insurance.

The guy I spoke to said, “You got it, Take It!”

And so we went on public health insurance. The thing everyone is so afraid of. I can’t tell you what a relief it has been to have this. We found a doctor’s office in Stamford that is a bit hectic but the service is pretty darn good. Prescriptions, which used to be a major expense, are suddenly free, although some of them are challenged, somewhat arbitrarily it seems. My son had strep throat - we had to see the doctor twice, got excellent care, and finally got antibiotics — and I haven’t received any bills. I was able to get a full physical exam, including blood work. The blood lab made a bureaucratic error and sent me the bill instead of Medicaid - it was $903! This is for just ordinary annual physical blood work. Of course just seeing that bill nearly gave me a cardiac, and I was in a panic until I called and found out it was a clerical error that I was billed instead of Medicaid (I’m hoping it’s solved — you never know). But why in the hell is it so expensive in the first place?

The Medicaid includes dental, but this isn’t such a happy story. I went to a Medicaid dentist and they did x-rays, then the lightest of cleanings, telling me that the real cleaning that I needed would cost $150 per quadrant, or $600. It’s like a bait-and-switch operation. So I took us all back to our regular dentist and charged it on my credit card.

So my experience in general with public health care has been very good. Thank God my children and I have health insurance.

When I went back to town social services and mentioned this to the director there, she said, “Now you have to worry about losing benefits if you earn too much.”

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/financialstress/2009/10/29/how-public-health-care-helps-my-family/feed/