The Debt Fight

About me and why I started this blog
www.thedebtfight.com

First I would like to start off by saying hello to everyone and I thank you for allowing me to share my story about my ongoing Debt Fight.

I started this blog to show the ongoing journey that is trying to get out of debt. My hopes are that together, between you all and I, we can keep track of, hold responsible and accountable for, and show the real life daily struggle of trying to get out of debt without some type of magical assistance. By magical assistance I mean getting some type of inheritance, winning the lottery, or getting tons of money out of the blue.

Every day of my life I get reminded of how detrimental it is having a house of debt on my shoulders and how limited my life is because of it. The ideology behind making me publicizing my journey is to show you all what has or has not worked for me, the internal emotional/psychological struggle, any hindrance it has on my everyday life, the success and failures of attempting to get out of debt, and hopefully, one day, I can write a post on here and say that I am officially debt free.

So let’s start by having a little back story of me, my life, and how I got myself into over $50,000 of unsecured debt, i.e. personal loans and credit cards, $20,000 in my personal upcoming student loans, $52,000 of my wife’s student loans, a $14,000 car finance, and a $145,000-dollar mortgage. Just typing out these numbers and it is already causing my heart to race because it is so difficult to understand how someone can get themselves in such a mess! By no means do I consider myself an idiot, though you probably can’t tell by that amount of debt. The problem here lies in the psychology behind acquiring the debt and how much our past life has dictated the upcoming future.

My name is Delfin Obed Cuevas, but my whole life I have gone by my nick name Obie. I am currently 29 years old and I was born in the biggest city (by area) in New Jersey, Vineland. I like to joke around with people stating that this was my first mistake. For those who do not know, Vineland is a city in the county of Cumberland, the poorest county in New Jersey. While the rest of the state has a tax rate of 7%, Cumberland is only 3.5% and Cumberland County’s poverty level is at 20% while the average state level is roughly 11%. I am the son of a wonderfully beautiful and strong Hispanic women who did her best in single handedly raising two boys. My mother worked multiple jobs to provide the essentials we needed, but we were always one paycheck missed from always being homeless. There was even times with her working so much, we still ended up being homeless, thank goodness for her sisters for always looking out for us and giving us a temporary place to stay while she saved and got back on her feet. This was the everyday norm, never knowing whether or not we’ll have enough money to pay rent and bills. You see as kids, we don’t truly understand the struggle our parents have to go through, some more than others. So I went to “poor” schools, in a poor community, with poor people, who knew nothing better because these are the cards we were dealt.

One of my biggest complaint in my adult life is why couldn’t we have learned personal finance in school. If we were taught how to balance a check book, the difference between credits and debits, money management, savings and planning, investments and “real world” financial situations, this could have saved so many headaches later on. But if that were the case, then I probably wouldn’t be here writing this blog recording my journey on hopefully one day being debt free.

My mother married my stepfather, who worked minimum wage at a chicken factory, when I was 9 years old. Life as a child was difficult because my mother was constantly getting sick, presumably from the malnutrition and the fact she couldn’t really take care of herself because she always worked. When I was 10 my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer and thankfully she survived but this left a bigger financial burden. She stayed in remission for 7 years until she was once again struck by breast cancer, once again thankfully she survived, but the financial toll hurt. My whole pre-adult life I only knew being in debt and seeing my household live paycheck to paycheck, so this was the norm.

So fast forward to my 18th birthday, now I’m an adult and throughout the years I have not saved a penny though I have been working since I was 15. I entered college on financial aid so I was excited I can go to college for free and receive a stipend. Since my mother wasn’t able to work anymore at this point, it fell upon my stepfather and I to support our household, therefore I had to drop out of college. Something that wasn’t explained to me, thank you County College financial advisors, when you drop out of school the federal government comes at you wanting their money for that year back; of course this wasn’t paid until MUCH later in my life.

I worked and worked for my household and it still wasn’t enough to help out and that is when I learned about the marvelous this called a credit card! IT WAS A GIFT SENT DOWN THAT WOULD SAVE ME!!!... yeah right… You see, so little of us are taught how to use a credit card, and since everything was an emergency in my household, the credit card was used a lot. In my head, as long as I made the minimum payments, I was ok – never knew the effects of high interest. Fast forward a couple more years, about 22 years old now and I accrued some minor debt but also have worked my way up my job to assistant manager making $42,000 in an auto chain store --$42,000!!!!! This was more money than my stepfather, mother little disability checks, and my old job COMBINED! I thought I was damn rich! I helped pay more bills at home, stated to buy myself some better things, financed a car since mine was always breaking down, figured I would pick up a new one. Got higher limit credit cards and was always in the mindset, “as long as I can afford the payments, I’ll be ok.” Affording the ITEM and affording PAYMENTS are two completely different things! And so continued the downward spiral that is now my financial life.

I ended up buying a house in 2011 with my girlfriend of 6 years. In our area, I figured it was cheaper to buy a house than to rent one, which for the most part was true. BUT I was still in the mindset of if I can afford the payments, I’m ok. Life just got harder and harder, more and more went on the credit cards, and I developed depression that for the financially uneducated lead me to buying things to make me feel better. I would go out, buy things on a whim, want to help others financially, start new adventures, want to just uproot and attempt different things in my life. It’s a good thing I was given possible the best wife that anchored me down and helped me with a lot. Turns out I was suffering from depression and with some medicine, some talk therapy, and a cat, I’ve been getting better. But now I have all this debt that I have accumulated over the years and no clue what to do.

So I studied, read, attempted many things, failed every time, and here I am – still a failure. That is why I decided to start this blog, accountability and more learning. Hopefully through my story and posts, I can one day I can write up the I’m Debt Free post. Also hopefully this can help all of you who are looking for inspiration on to just keep going, for me, bankruptcy is not a viable option – though it would be easier.

Thank you for coming along my journey with me.

-Obie

10/3/16 Fixed formatting issues. (Random space bars in the beginning adds a funky scroll to the text body)