When everyone around me said that you need to have a financial safety net, I thought that saving and saving was not for me. Now I really regret that I did not listen, did not understand and refused to acknowledge the possible unsuccessful scenario in my life. I was a happy wife, my husband and I had 2 children, and we were planning a third as soon as we sorted out the purchase of an apartment and a house.
But my husband died, and it turned out that he not only left me alone without financial support and help, but also with debts. We had barely paid off our mortgage, and a house was next in line. But as it turned out later, my husband generally hid his financial affairs from me. He only pretended that everything was fine with us, but in fact the debts were growing. Later I found out that we actually lived on loans and credits for a whole year.
The interest on them grew, but no one even repaid them. In the end, it turned out that the apartment doesn’t really belong to us – it’s paid off and we own it, but all the other cards and loans have such debts that they’re barely enough to cover the debt.
When I found out about this, I had an internal protest – they say, I won’t sell my only home in order to cover the debts. But lawyers advised to act differently. The husband incurred so many debts that collectors began to pursue him. I saw and heard that strangers were calling him, but he didn’t want to talk to them, he hung up calls, but at the same time his face changed. When I tried to find out something, he constantly laughed it off, saying that they were annoyingly offering him a job that he didn’t like. He said that he would agree to it if the customers raised the salary. For this purpose, he “turned on” the hostility mode and fought them off – so that they would call after thinking about it and offer him more money. Subsequently, it turned out that no one offered him anything; he was not given any roles (my husband was an actor) in cinema, theater, or even in crowd scenes or advertising. At the same time, we constantly lived beyond our means, took out loans and incurred debts.
We lived together for 9 years, and met at the institute. I studied to be a decorative artist and sculptor, and my future husband was an actor. I always had pocket money, I’ve been around since my first year, I sold my work wherever and however I could. My parents also helped me a little. Everything should have been pretty good for Artem: there were filming, participation in TV shows, part-time jobs, etc., etc. But then at some point he seemed tired of the constant struggle. In an actor’s career, if you don’t work and don’t make your way, don’t work every day so that they know about you, so that you open up in a new way, then they forget about you the very next day. Artem thought that everything would go just like clockwork. Alas, he chose the wrong career. He didn’t want to go into business, he called hired work hard labor, and then there were so many reservations that I don’t even want to give them here. Everything around him was wrong and wrong, but from a financial point of view we always lived well.
At first I earned more, then Artem’s parents began to help us (just at the moment when the first child was born), and then, as I now began to understand, my husband became heavily addicted to loans.
He had some property, which he received as a gift from his parents: a motorcycle, his own well-equipped, warm garage. The money from the sale of all this went to pay off the loans. But instead of stopping, the husband continued to live on loans. This led to persecution by banks and then by debt collectors. Artem had an anxious personality, and he did not survive one of the collector’s calls. When they started calling him again and threatening him with violence, he had a heart attack, and my husband could not be saved. The husband did not write a statement to the police, but countered with the fact that threats are prohibited, and then at one point he simply died.
I learned all this much later, and little by little the picture began to take shape into a single whole. I had to pull myself together: there was literally nothing to feed the children. I started going through our things, selling things for which I could get money right away and in cash: a baby stroller, a stereo system, a plasma TV, some of my husband’s gadgets, musical equipment, etc.
Then it was time to resolve debt issues. The collectors did not leave us behind, although they knew that Artem was no longer alive. I realized that my mother-in-law’s life, my life, and the lives of my children were already at risk. Lawyers advised us to sell and pay off the debt, since the situation was difficult – our apartment could have been taken away from us by law, but by the time all the courts were over, there would have been such interest that we would have to look for more money to completely cover all the loans. We all lived together, and it is unknown how the showdown with the collectors would have ended if they had decided to act illegally again.
I promptly sold the apartment and moved into a rented apartment with my children. There were no debts, but there was money left for exactly 2 months of life. There wasn’t much work either, so I went where they hired me – as an apprentice tram driver. I became a driver and exhaled a little.
Now my task is to return to where I started, namely, to earn money through creativity on an ongoing basis. I need to take care of my older children, plus my mother and mother-in-law also need financial help, although they are embarrassed to accept it. My mother-in-law generally feels guilty about everything, constantly apologizes to me and feels sorry for me. Sometimes it seems to me that she loves me more than she loved her son – at least she respects the common sense that I follow, but Artem’s actions, as she often confessed to me, were often inexplicable and incomprehensible to her.
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2023-09-29 20:18:01
#thought #husbands #death #tram #driver #support
