I guess I didn’t actually have to give up on Genghis Conehead, because Genghis did it for me. This will be the last episode of this season of (exciting music) “Chris McGinty – Enemy of Debt.” Lined up for Season Two is Nathan’s finances. I will post about my thoughts on his situation next week.
The first incident of relevance is that when we went to pay Genghis’s payday loans, I loaned him enough to get him out of them for good. He only owed me $8 at this point, but his rent was due the day we were getting our guard checks, and his guard check would not be enough to pay it all. By the time he paid the rent and I put gas in the vehicle, he owed me $165.
The following Sunday night, I got a call from his wife. She told me that he was saying that he wasn’t going to listen to me anymore, and asked if I could come by and talk to him. When I got there, he was in a pissy mood. He was irrational and irate, telling me that I told him it would only be two months. I told him from the beginning that it would take until the end of the year to get him in a reasonable position. And even if I’d figured wrong that’s not a reasonable reason to act the way he was acting. He wouldn’t even be where he was if it wasn’t for me loaning him money at almost every turn.
To make matters worse, he tried telling me that he paid me back for the money I loaned him. This is when I had to recount the last few incidents, and why he owed me. I then explained to him that this is why he was going to fuck everything up yet again. He doesn’t pay attention to his money at all. Needless to say, after a whole lot of yelling, I told him that I would be over for my money Wednesday morning, and he had until then to come to his senses. He didn’t. He made it clear to his wife that he wasn’t going to listen to me, and she called me to tell me that.
I texted that morning to tell them that I would be by to get my money, and that since I was no longer talking to him, he needed to give it to her. This is when I was informed that he could only give me $100 this paycheck. I texted back, “Fuck you.” Then I got in my car and drove over there.
When I got there, she had found some more money, but it was still only $140. She explained that he had two flat tires, one which was probably sliced. He presumed I did that, by the way. I told her that if I was going to cut his tires, I would have cut all four, and probably broke at least one window. I’m not a vengeful person, but if I’m going to cross that line, I’m going to do it right. I started yelling at him up the stairs that he was going to go and get a payday loan to pay me the last $25 he owed me. She told me I was being unreasonable, and I explained to her that I was not. By this point he was likely to have bought soda, cigarettes, energy drinks, and who knows what else, and that was my $25 to spend, not his.
So I continued yelling at him. He tried telling me that I would have to wait until he got his guard check. I told him I would do nothing of the sort, and that it’s pretty amazing that it took him exactly one check to start fucking up. This was his check from his main job. He had enough to pay me back, and I wasn’t loaning him money, even by proxy of not insisting that he pay me everything back right then. I explained, in a tone of voice that hurt my throat, that he wouldn’t have been able to pay off the payday loan if I hadn’t been willing to loan him money for rent, so going and getting a new payday loan was going to put him exactly where he had been prior to me loaning him the money .I explained that wasn’t leaving, and I wasn’t going to stop yelling until he either called the police to have me removed, or went to get my money. This is when he came to the top of the stairs and threw $22 at me saying, “That’s everything I have. You’ll have to wait for the other three dollars.
I picked it up and said, “Keep the change, asshole.” I don’t know why, but that line felt like something an action hero would say. An irrational whiny ass action hero in my case, but I felt justified enough since he was holding back money. As I walked out, I showed his wife the $22 and said, “This is why I wasn’t being unreasonable.” She simply apologized and said that she didn’t know he still had money.
I spoke with her later, and he was talking about going to get a $200 payday loan. I mentioned that their daughter has diabetes. I guess he was supposed to get something for her and hadn’t yet, and he had held aside the money he threw at me because of some cookout that he was going to with a co-worker from the guard company. For whatever reason, he was put in charge of buying the beer. I told her that she needed to start saving her child support money, because he would have it screwed up by the beginning of the year.
The final bit of this is that I called his mother-in-law and explained what was going on. I said that she could do what she wanted, but that she needed to understand that he was supposed to pay her back money he owed her from one of the next couple of checks, and he was supposed to either buy that vehicle from her or buy something else. I told her that she would have to insist on being paid, or he was likely not to make it a priority.
I explained why I thought he chose the beginning of October to do this. He was getting three guard checks in October and he’s getting three checks from his regular job in November. Sadly, while I would have insisted on him piling money into an emergency fund and paying his mother-in-law back some, I would have eased up a lot on him not having spending money, because he was no longer flushing hundreds of dollars in fees down the metaphorical toilet each month. I’m not saying that the last two and a half months of the year would have been easy, but he would have started 2012 in a good position.
Maybe all of this will sink in now that he’s “controlling” his finances again. Maybe not having money for so long will make him wary of payday loans and spending too much. I doubt it, but I can hope. If he never gets himself into that bad of a position again then I guess I can call the whole thing a success, but since I believe he will fuck it up, I’m declaring it a success on probation (based on the fact that he wasn’t evicted yet, though he did lose his vehicle, and he should have money for Christmas, but he wasn’t supposed to still be working two jobs by January). The problem is that he has no sense of saving money for a rainy day, and it hardly counts as a success to me if he has to keep working two jobs to make ends meet when he could do it with one job if he was careful with his money.
Regardless, this is the end of this season of (exciting music) “Chris McGinty – Enemy of Debt.” Be sure to check in next week for my thoughts on Nathan’s finances, and then check in starting in 2012 when I try to convince Nathan that the things that I’m telling him are for his own good, even if they make him uncomfortable, provided Nathan is still willing to do it after next week.
If only we saw this coming.