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Sunday, October 10, 2010

Am I the only one?

I constantly feel like this lonely creature among a pack of the uncaring. Constantly ridiculed, questioned, and neglected by the world will it ever get better?


I jumped around colleges a lot before I settled and graduated. All said and done, I ended up with a little over 100,000 in student loan debts, the majority of which is private. Two months before I graduated Sallie Mae (who hold the majority of my debt) stopped all consolidation of private loans due to the economy. Combine that with 2 months of missed credit card payments (2 months and my credit score droped 180 points) and I couldn't find anyone to consolidate my loans even when I was employed full time. I'm living at home, unemployed, scraping by doing freelance web design and development but its just not enough. I've managed to pay half of them so far but the other have are approaching default. I have collectors calling me 14 hours a day 7 days a week. My family is poor and has always been poor so there is no financial support from them outside of a roof over my head. Every day that goes by I can just feel myself slipping deeper and deeper into depression, an issue I've had since I was a  child.
I'm not looking for pity. I signed the papers and I brought this upon myself. I was a stupid kid, but thats not an excuse. I need to take responsibility and fix this myself but I just don't know what to do. It's become harder and harder to motivate myself because I truly feel like I have no hope any longer. I send out applications both for industry jobs and shit jobs and there is just nothing. I just can't deal with this any longer. Honestly the only reason I haven't put a bullet in my head is because some of my loans (the ones I have been paying) have family cosigners and I cannot allow my horrible decisions to affect them. I hate my life and I hate myself for what i've done to it.
Any advice is welcome, be it financial, personal or otherwise.

4 comments:

OneFourSeven said...

You sound just like me.

Keep your chin up, work hard on whatever you can that will maximize your returns. That's the best advice I can give, and I know it's really commonsense and cliche, but hell, it works. I dig this blog, you're obviously good at what you do.

This doesn't guarantee that everything will get better. But if you do your absolute damnedest and it all goes sour anyway... well at least you can say you fought for what you wanted, and never laid down like most people do in this world.

RevQuigley said...

That does kinda explain the sex drive... Depression heightens it. No advice, though, sorry. Good luck.

ty said...

I too have debt from college. After looking for over a month, sending out 50+ job bids, I finally found a company who was in a crunch and needed a web developer. I interviewed, and so did others, and a week later, I got the call.

Just keep looking. Make sure your resume is 1 page, sharp looking, and as impressive as possible. Clean up your facebook so a random conservative would be charmed by you. Then, make a list of job openings from craigslist and similar sites, copy->paste a template letter you've previously written, tailor it quickly to meet the job, add your fancy resume, send, and don't think about it.

In my experience, maybe 1 in 10 replied at all. Of those, 1 in 5 made an offer. Just like anything else, it's statistics. Improve all the subjective things, like resume appearance, your e-mail grammar, and then objectively spam yourself to the world and you will get a job.

Talk to the debt collectors, tell them how many resumes you sent out today, ask for their e-mail so you can CC future job applications to them, try to reason with them. Schedule a time for you to call them for a weekly update. Trust me, you're in control of this relationship as you owe the debt.

If all else fails, put yourself on the do not call registry https://www.donotcall.gov/ and change numbers if needed.

LA is expensive. Consider relocating if things aren't looking good after 2 months. Consider food stamps. Spend less time on Reign and other pass times if you need to in order to focus on getting back on your feet, so that then you can enjoy Reign and other things more. I promise, it'll always be there.

Roqi said...

Thanks for your advice guys. I feel better just getting this off my mind and having people care.