I just finished reading a very interesting article about how employers use credit reports to discriminate against job applicants here “The Long Shadow of Bad Credit in a Job Search”, which was very eye opening.
When I was younger, I went through a difficult period, it felt like my entire life imploded, and this is the time in my life when I started to suffer serious depression. One of the major contributing factors to this difficulty in my life was financial problems.
The first time in my life when I started to experience the hell of American bureaucracy and loopholes in financial matters was in the early 90’s. My then wife and I were both food servers at the Hard Rock Cafe Las Vegas. All things considered this was a pretty good job, it was hip and cool, you made a lot of tips, and it was fun. I did learn pretty early that you had to fit in, I saw what happened to people who “weren’t quite cool enough” or just didn’t fit in, so I put a lot of effort into making nice.
One night, I get a phone call from one of the managers at work that my wife had slipped and fallen at work, and that she had broken her leg, and I needed to get there as soon as possible to take her to the hospital. I instantly flew into panic mode and began the mad dash to work. It wouldn’t dawn on me until a few days later that it was unusual for them to ask me to take her to the hospital instead of calling an ambulance, since it was work related. I learned all too late that that was their plan. I found out later that when my wife had fallen and broken her leg due to an excessively soapy floor, the first thing the shift manager did, before checking on her or seeing if she needed help, he went to the computer and clocked her out of her shift, to reduce company liability. Once I arrived and got her in the car and rushed her to the nearest hospital, we had problems with admission and getting care because the nurses informed us that if this was a workplace accident then she should have been brought by ambulance from the work place, and that now we were in a legal and billing “grey area” because I had brought her in privately. This was only the beginning of our troubles.
You see, in Las Vegas, there is a special law about minimum wage for tipped employees, you can be paid less then minimum wage, at the time I think it was something like $2.70/hour, which wasn’t a problem for us, since we made $200-300 per day in tips. It often was the case that I went into work on payday and they would tell me “you owe $15 this paycheck”, since medicare, taxes, insurance etc usually ate up the measly paycheck of 30 hours at $2.50/hour, and I usually just whipped out my wad of tips and paid the company on pay day. The real nightmare came when we found out that my wife, who was not going to be able to work for a year due to workplace negligence, was only entitled to 66% of her hourly wage in workman’s comp to support us in our time of hardship. That’s right, 66% of $2.70/hour is $1.80/hour, so for a 40 hour week, we would get about $80. Not only did we lose half our earning power, but now we had lots of impediments to working a normal schedule like doctors appointments and physical therapy and paperwork appointments with government agencies like workman’s comp, and we were expected to live on $80/week plus whatever I could earn. We were forced to rely more and more heavily on our credit cards until this situation was made right. Bad news for me, it was never made right.
I still remember the feeling of validation I had the first day I opened that letter and there was that amazing plastic key to adulthood known as the Credit Card. I took credit very seriously and was proud of my credit, I even got an additional card issued on my account in my mother in laws name, so she could start to build up her credit (she had never had one before, and within no time she had built up her own credit and gotten her own cards), credit had never been a problem for me, I had a good job, always made my payments, had a great credit score.
Taking the financial hit we did from her getting injured at work was almost too much to absorb. We had to pay utilities, groceries, medicine, all with cards, for nearly a year. When my awesome credit score brought a new “pre-approved card” in the mail, I had little choice but to start using it to keep us afloat.
Finally by the time I had maxed out four cards, I went to my local bank, which rhymes with “Bells Cargo”, and applied for a $2000 loan, the extremely eager loan officer rushed me through the process, and I was leaving half an hour later with the money in hand, it was almost too easy. I went back almost two weeks later to make my first payment on the loan, only to find out that my bank had been bought out (but was assured that my account was still in place and would be honored by the new bank who’s initial were FIB). Imagine my surprise when the new loan officer told me that they did not show a loan on their records, and that my account was $2000 overdrawn, and that my account would be frozen until I paid back the overdraft. I tried explaining that I had gotten an approved loan from the previous bank, but this lady wasn’t having any of it. I walked out feeling shocked, amazed, and devastated, asking myself what I had done wrong. Had I not filled out the loan application correctly? Was this some paperwork error? This was only one stop on a long journey of financial and credit woes that were in store for me. This was when I began to feel terrible about myself, I started getting a feeling deep in the pit of my stomach that would eventually turn into ulcers.
Of course I took an extra job, stopped going to school, and started fall further and further behind on the bills. But tried my best to chug through it.
Soon I started getting harassing creditor phone calls at home, at all hours of the night, then they started at work, sometimes 8 calls a day, to each. I started feeling worthless, and helpless, I had been proud of my credit, I wanted to pay these cards, I wanted to tell each and every creditor that they had it wrong, that I wasn’t a deadbeat, I was a good guy with good credit, I was just in a bad circumstance with my wife being injured and we were caught in a legal loophole, but the more I explained, the more they were convinced I was a deadbeat.
All my problems could be solved by money, but I just couldn’t lay my hands on enough of it, and all the money I could get, was barely enough to take care of us.
A few months after my wife returned to work, she told me she wanted a trial separation, I offered that maybe I could stay in the other bedroom, but she suggested I stay in a whole other apartment. We were supposed to work on our relationship, supposed to go to therapy, but neither happened. Deep down I knew that was what she really wanted, and she had already begun another relationship. I spiraled into depression even worse than before, and lost my job shortly after, which only made things worse. I think I was permanently depressed for several years after that. My life just faded into a drifting haze of being poor, harassing creditors, and the worst jobs I have ever had.
I have never liked thinking about that time of my life, and I have only recently come to realize that I had not done anything wrong. I tried my best to do the right thing, it was all to try to take care of someone I loved.
I have tried very hard to improve myself, always searching and trying to improve to find that magical bridge to success, so that I can repair everything that happened before, wipe away that stain from my record and become a stable guy with the better credit score again. But like the guy in the article above, I could never figure out why I never could get the better jobs, that they seemed so interested, and then when the credit check was done they lost interest, it really pisses me off to think that the things I had to do to take care of us, when we were caught in a legal bind that today is now illegal in Nevada, were the very things that kept me from succeeding later in life.