Chris McGinty – Enemy of Debt – Episode Seven

Welcome to Episode Seven of: Chris McGinty – Enemy of Debt

For an explanation of this feature, and disclaimers that talk about how I’m not a professional money anything, go to Episode One. If you are caught up to speed though, we’ll begin discussing my friend who called me in financial desperation on July 10, 2011. Out of some, perhaps slight respect for his privacy, I’m not using his real name. I am instead referring to him as Genghis Continuing Saga of a Man in Debt.

I want you to understand that if I woke up in Genghis’s position, I would have handled things a lot differently. First off, luckily, I wouldn’t be addicted to cigarettes, but even if I was, I would have just quit in the interest of getting my bills paid. I would have let all of my loans default. I would have focused all of my efforts on getting a second job and getting my rent paid. I only say this because if you read the last episode, you know that we had to really go out of our way to pay the title loan, and prior to that we had to really go out of our way to pay the payday loans. And we’re still going to have to go out of our way to pay all of these in the coming month. Too much hassle for something that could have been put off to collections. He’s fearful of getting charged for check fraud again.

I texted him Tuesday night and told him that I would be come by in the morning after work and sleep on his couch until the money from his dad came in. He chose this time to confess that the money wasn’t from his dad at all, but from his share stocks from his job.

Now the stocks were only about $200 and he’d asked me if he should cash them out. I said no at the time. I explained that if they would clear up the mess that I would say yes, but they wouldn’t. I told him that as a savings and investment vehicle, stock shares in the company you work for isn’t great, but at least for now, we would have it as something to fall back on. I guess he decided now was the time to fall back on it, and yes, his van would have been repossessed if he hadn’t, but he was to make no money decisions without me.

By that morning, I was really tired, and was feeling the beginnings of a cold. I told him to just call me when it came in. The reason is that there was a slight possibility that it might come in the next day.

He called me at around 2:30 in a panic, because he’d not slept much, and they weren’t there yet, and they said it may be as late as 7 pm, and he was supposed to be at work at 5 pm, and he was thinking he should just call in.

I told him that if he missed Fed Ex, they would leave instructions on how to get the package. Plus, if he called in, not only would he be written up, but he would lose out on a little over $100 in wages over a $150 check.

He told me that he had smoked all the cigarettes he had, and needed me to bring him another pack. I told him he needed to slow down on the smoking, but that I would meet him at the guard office and bring him one pack.

When I got there he explained to me that the check came in right after we got off the phone, and just to make things easier, he went ahead and cashed it. He said it was $150 but that the bank required him to put $5 in to keep his account open. I told him to give me the money he had, and then yelled at him because he was supposed to call me when the check came in, and that he was fucking lying to me.

He called me once he was at his guard post, and tried justifying his position. I told him I wanted the truth, because I was going to find out the truth anyway. He said the check was for $160, but that he had to put some in the bank, and then he got $4 in gas. I said $4 was interestingly similar to the price of a pack of cigarettes, and he swore he didn’t buy cigarettes, but the interesting thing is that he got through just fine on the one pack of cigarettes I gave him until the weekend. So I’m still calling bullshit. We paid the rest of the van payment the next day.

Since then, I have loaned him $4 for gas, and $2 for crickets for his wife’s geckos. As I write this it is Tuesday, August 02, 2011, and he gets his paycheck from his full time job tomorrow. He owes me $522 right now. I’ve decided to let his rent run late, because he insists that the payday loans have to be paid. I have very little money until August 8, 2011. I will meet him at his work in the morning, and he will pay me back the $522. We will then use what’s left over to pay on the payday loans.

I don’t know what his check is going to be, and I don’t know if I’ll loan him anything after he pays me, but I do know this much. Before we do anything, we are going to go to his bank and get a detailed transaction report, and figure out exactly how much money he’s lied to me about. I’m supposed to buy ten packs of cigarettes tomorrow to last for the next twenty days (I was giving him one every day and a half, but I’m going to slowly lower how much he smokes at least while we’re doing this). However much it turns out he’s lied to me about is going to come out of his cigarette money, because I’m presuming he bought cigarettes with it, for the reasons I mentioned above.

Regardless, since he insists on paying his payday loans, even if I don’t take back what he owes me, he doesn’t have enough for his rent and his payday loans tomorrow, so he’ll have to go late on the rent. He’s lucky because he gets three paychecks from his main job this month because of the way the paydays fell, and he will have two paychecks from the guard job. If we pay his payday loans tomorrow, he’ll face late fees with his rent, but he’ll have enough to pay it in two weeks. If he hasn’t lied to me too much, I might help when I get my check on Monday. And as we end off this episode, I know as much as you do about how well this will work.