Free at last (?)

Spring 2001 was a long time ago. It was before 9/11, before Stephanie had earned her master’s degree, before the rise and fall of my tenure-track college teaching career, and before Vincent had left elementary school.

It was also the year that we – in lieu of declaring bankruptcy – signed up with the Consumer Credit Counseling Service in Tallahassee – then of the Sun Coast – to work with them to consolidate most of our personal/consumer credit debt, have them renegotiate lower rates, and then us send them money (lump sum) and they disburse the checks to our various individual creditors (charging us just $25 a month).. John Sweeney was the agent we worked with first, and Donna a colleague of his. Stephanie – then later I too – met with them at the old Koger office center. We had a ton of credit card debt – which family members had helped pay down once – and legal bills from the late 1990s custody trial (see “A blast from . . . “). And for several years we’d been getting occasionally mean and often annoying calls and letters from these various creditors, in addition to spending a lot of time writing different checks and sending in different bills. And so that spring Mr. Sweeney negotiated down interest rates with all but about three creditors and we cut up all but our bank debit cards – and began what was to be four- or five-year process that would slowly and surely restore our credit and even possibly position us to buy a house – with some help from CCCS – at the end of it.

Every month since then – instead of fielding collections calls and writing a dozen checks a month for credit card bills – I’ve gone through the ritual – in Sarasota, St. Paul, Macomb, Bradenton, and Louisville – and sometimes when I’m traveling – including in San Francisco and Portland – of coming up with $1,300 in cash (often with lots of help), buying an official check (this is why we need a local bank account – even just a shell account) (explaining to bank staff how they could abbreviate CCCS’s long name enough so that it would fit was also an adventure), and mailing it in to reach Orlando by the 20th of the month.

Well, four years turned into 7 ½ years. We added more legal debt and wound up in the last year having CCCS – which had grown and absorbed half of Florida – but still had clients like us strewn around the country – just pay off three creditors who had not lowered our rates. (Only once – last year – did a check get lost in the mail.) We’ve been getting very erratic bills from Stephanie’s second lawyer. But I believe that as of today – with this smallish money order (instead official check that I am mailing in – we will have finished paying off our legal bills and consumer debt (with only student loan debt and personal debt remaining) and have completed our work with Consumer Credit Counseling. Mr. Sweeney is gone, but THANKS to him and Donna and colleagues (as well as anyone who has helped us make the payments) for helping us get out of (consumer/legal) debt!