I've found myself in an awful financial situation, and I'm honestly not even sure where to start to go about fixing it, and I just keep making things worse. I'm just hoping someone can at least point me where to start, and what my options realistically are.
Basically, my ex left me ruined and I don't know how to go about fixing it. Here's the story:
My ex and I were dating for about three years, starting while I was in college. My senior year of college, after we'd been together about 9 months, he got sick. He started staying with me, and when I graduated we moved in together. He was no longer working so I was supporting both of us, while he stayed at home. This is where I made my first mistake: because I was working all the time and constantly stressed, he volunteered to manage the finances and I agreed because they were never my strong suit to begin with.
This is how it was for the last year and a half of our relationship. I worked full time, often overtime, trying to pull ends together and make sure bills were covered. He managed the bills, and figured out groceries and what few extraneous purchases we could afford. Even so, I was starting to get strained as I was starting to notice that a lot of our 'extra' things were what he wanted, and we could never afford anything I did.
Then, about 6 months ago, we finally broke up, and he pushed me to move out. I was honestly so exhausted at the time that I didn't really fight him, I just took the stuff I had and moved in with a friend of mine.
It wasn't until I went to try to purchase a new bed (since he kept the old one) that I learned that not only was my 'emergency fund' credit card maxed out, there were 4 other credit cards in my name that had all been maxed out, and I had 'missed' every single payment for that month on those cards because I didn't even know they existed. Between all the cards that existed, I have nearly 12k in debt spread across 6 cards, only 2k of which I had been aware of (due to making some poor financial decisions while in college).
I confronted him about it and there was a big argument. I don't really want to go into to much detail about our actual relationship, but needless to say my ability to stand up for myself had been broken down over the years without me really noticing. Eventually I agreed to his offer to send me $150 a month until he'd paid me back (which I now know and realize was a really shit offer and I honestly shouldn't have even given it consideration.)
I can barely get by. Between rent and the bills at my new place, I can't afford to pay down the credit. I can barely afford to pay the minimums, and often miss at least 1 payment a month. My credit score has dropped from the 700s to 400, and that's after borrowing a ton of money from my parents just to cover the surprise costs of the original move.
I know the obvious answer is to sue him for credit fraud. The evidence supports it: for nearly a year there were 4 credit cards in my name with his email and phone number as the contact info, and all of the purchases made with those cards are still in his ownership. But I can't afford representation, and he has a law degree and I know him well enough to know he won't settle, and I don't think I can afford to support myself for the duration of a legal battle even if I do end up winning; which, given that I verbally gave him full access to my finances and verbally accepted his offer to pay me back (and, over the course of the 4 months since we came to that agreement, have accepted $600 in payback money from him), I don't even know if I still have ground to stand on. On top of that... I honestly don't want to. I really don't want to have to deal with him again, and if I can find a way to recover that doesn't require me turning back to him, I'd certainly prefer that.
I still have college loans to pay back, rent, gas, and internet at my new apartment, plus the credit debt on all 6 of these cards which I haven't managed to reduce at all. I don't know where to turn or how to even begin fixing this mess, so I'm asking for help here. And yes, I know I made a bunch of terrible choices in how to handle this mess, so I'd appreciate if you guys could skip over the mistakes I made to point me in the right direction to actually start repairing my life.
Thank you for your help.
EDIT: Honestly don't know how I didn't include this initially, but during that 6 month period I also switched jobs. My new job is higher paying and not dependent on tips, but because I'm still new the hours haven't evened out and it makes it difficult to budget based on that, but I'm hoping it will at least alleviate some of the monthly bill problems once I get things on a regular schedule.
Submitted October 04, 2018 at 12:11AM by LSunday https://ift.tt/2O2ahNX
