Four years ago, Patrick moved into a new house in a nice Chicago suburb with his wife and and 7-year-old daughter. Now the high history teacher is in debt and divorced.
It started with a good friend asking for Patrick’s help.
“His parents were sick, so he needed a few thousand to help his parents with medical things,” Patrick recalls. “I would get paid back almost immediately.”
Instead, Patrick says, “Then there were more medical things with his parents.” Which meant more pleas for more loans.
“Being someone who values honesty and integrity and all that, I kept thinking this is going to work out because a friend said it’s going to work out,” Patrick says, shaking his head. “That just made a bad situation worse.”
Eventually, Patrick had lent his friend $28,000, which wiped him out. Then he had to hire an attorney to get the money back. That’s still ongoing. So is his divorce.
“We’re going through the divorce because I never told my wife about any of the money I lent to my friend, because I thought it would all work out,” Patrick says, he didn’t want to worry his wife, and he was also embarrassed.
“Then it was little lies on top of little lies,” Patrick says. “And then trying to figure out ways to make back money without saying anything. It led to bad decisions.”
Now Patrick is living with his mother, and his credit card debt is over $50,000. He had to do something.
Making the call
“I was in debt and was also facing an uncertain future with everything,” he says. “I was gullible and naive and lost.”
Then he found Consolidated Credit.
“I was someone that up until almost a year ago, I had never had a balance on a credit card,” he says. So he didn’t know where to turn. His internet searches didn’t reassure him.
“I was looking things up and talking to places, and it just felt slimy somehow,” he says. When he called Consolidated Credit, he felt better.
“I remember it was a Wednesday right before Halloween, and I talked to a counselor on the phone for almost 45 minutes,” he says. “I kept asking a lot of questions, and the counselor was very patient, very helpful. I just kept trying to find out where the catch was, and I wasn’t able to find anything negative.”
Instead, Patrick is seeing progress. “I even saw that my credit score went up a little bit in the last few weeks, so that was a little added bonus.”
But Patrick still beats himself up for getting into this situation in the first place.
“I didn’t just go in guns blazing on being a degenerate or something,” He says. “But I dug a hole and instead of getting out of the hole, I just kept digging. I even let people watch me dig it.”
Now he’s finally climbing out of that hole: “I finally feel hopefulness instead of helplessness.”
