munching on the credit crunch (finances; health)
I’ve got the first credit card I’ve been able to get in years, during this time when all of the news reports are talking about the credit crunch and how hard it is to get these days. I haven’t been able to get credit for over ten years, when I was diagnosed with HIV and did what so many people did – and still do – in that situation: I told myself that I had to do everything I ever wanted to do before I died.
I had thought about moving to San Francisco for several years but was afraid to do it because I had this fatalistic idea that I would end up infected with HIV, since it was so prevalent out there. Then my best friend moved out there. I was living in Washington, DC at the time, and got infected anyway.
By the way, fuck all of you who say that people infected in the 90’s and up through today are just “stupid”. I got infected in a way that they say is literally almost impossible, but besides that, there are all kinds of other things that can happen. To give only one example (and this is not what happened to me), is it stupid if someone is taking every possible precaution and the condom breaks? Grow up, you people. Life is not so cut and dried – and you’re part of the problem, not the solution. But I digress …
Anyway, I up and moved to San Francisco. For the first time in my life, I made a major move across the country with a place to live (my friend was between roommates, so he was living alone in a two bedroom apartment at the time), a job (albeit part-time and low-paying), and some friends and other people I knew. The other two times I had done that, I had none of those supports. Life is an adventure, isn’t it?
I left all of my stuff in D.C., in storage or in the condominium I had bought a few years earlier. I tried to rent my apartment as a furnished, corporate rental, but it didn’t go well. It was very well situated, but it was just a little bit too far from the ascending K Street lobbyist corridor, Capitol Hill and the government buildings, and the booming suburban office complexes of Maryland and Virginia. I couldn’t rent it as a regular apartment and cover the mortgage, and I couldn’t sell it without a loss as the real estate market has become slightly depressed since I purchased it. I didn’t have the money to cover the differences in either one of those scenarios. Besides, I thought I was going to die.
I ended up walking away from a condo that was appraised at between $75,000 and $80,000, but that I could sell today for about half a million. The real estate market in D.C. has changed just that much. Imagine if I had those capital gains to live on the rest of my life, instead of constantly stressing about money? I truly can’t think about that or I’d drive myself crazy with regret and envy and self-loathing.
They always tell you that after a bankruptcy, the credit card offers come pouring in. That certainly didn’t happen to me, and I had impeccable credit before that. In fact, ten years later I was still trying to get a new credit card from time to time, and constantly being turned down because I didn’t have credit. I wanted credit more for emergencies than anything else. Finally I saved some money (while I was still working) and gave it to my sister, and asked her to put me on one of her cards. She was agreeable to that, so at least I had that emergency resource.
Then I read an article around six months ago about how to re-establish credit, and it advised readers to start with retail cards. Much to my surprise, I got some. By then I had saved a little more money – I had resolved around that time to save ten percent of my disability check, despite the additional financial struggles that this would cause, with my boyfriend’s blessing and encouragement – and I opened a secured credit card account with that. None of it amounted to much, but it was something, and suddenly I had a credit rating. Finally, dashing through the airport to catch a connecting flight a month or two ago, on a whim I stopped by a booth and filled out an application for one of those cards affiliated with an airline, which earns frequent flyers miles. Much to my further surprise, I was approved.
This month, as an experiment, I’m “spending money” (that is, using my credit card as if I have the money) to see what my expenses would be like if I lived closer to a normal life. I mean, I’m not going crazy with purchases. I talking about buying food as if I didn’t have to depend on my boyfriend to eat much of the time, and paying a few more of our shared bills and expenses – stuff that I couldn’t normally even think about doing. I’m doing this partly because I am now determined to give us a clearer picture of what we spend and where we could cut back, and to get myself – and us – on a budget. He has long-term goals, I have long-term goals, and we have long-term goals, and none of that is going to happen if we (he, in particular, since I simply don’t have the income he has) don’t change the way we spend.
I’m a little worried about how I’ll pay the account later. However, my sister will be giving me back the money I gave her, since I transferred my balance on her card to my new card, and I have a couple of other unexpected bits of money coming in over the next month. In addition, I am continuing to work on developing more income for myself. So hopefully it will all work out in the end. At the very least, I should have a shit-load of frequent flyer miles.
