Cars, Casa, Chronic Illness
Donation protected
After months of long talks with family, friends, and confidants, I’ve decided to swallow my pride, make this fundraiser public, and admit that right now, we need a lot of help. My name is Lanier, and my amazing wife’s name is Kelly. We have decided to open up because despite our best efforts, we have not been able to financially weather a number of misfortunes over the past year.
In the past 16 months, a snowball of emergency expenses have piled up to equal more than my entire salary.
Foremost, we experienced two major hospitalizations with extensive ongoing care. My wife is one of the strongest and most resilient people I’ve ever known, and she has taken a host of diagnoses in stride and with grace. As some close friends may know, this has changed our lives drastically since May of 2018. After that however, the blows did not stop coming. In 2019 we experienced two car accidents which totaled both of our vehicles, a botched recall case with the NHTSA, extensive damage in our home not remedied by previous homeowners, and the sudden mid-summer death of our AC unit which cost more than either car.
Despite all of this, our lives are far from a sob-story. We are happy and grateful to have already received so much generosity from family and friends. We’ve worked hard to cut back and take on more work, even with some temporary employment limitations imposed by illness. But even with 3 jobs and multiple side gigs between us, the bills still far outpace our income. Frequently, we have sacrificed our daily needs to try to keep up with payments. Our means are on track to run out completely by January. At this point, all I can do is chalk it up to really, really, really bad luck... and the utter absurdity that any person in our country should have to beg for money for medical care.
The listed amount is what remains of all these emergency expenses after our best efforts and the generosity of our family. We may not receive the full amount listed, but our goal is to hopefully have enough to get our monthly payments down to a manageable level - and weather the pitfalls that cause 4 out of 5 bankruptcies in the US.
I am also working on finding assistance programs, but find that many don’t offer help if the emergency expenses are already on credit, or there is a poverty-line income cap. If you have any advice, experience, or recommendations of additional assistance programs, please message me.
I also encourage anyone who is in the same boat to open up about financial struggle. It took me over a year to realize that shame surrounding finances is a toxic stigma that unfairly targets the middle class and below. Staying quiet means your problems only fester, but also means the gaping holes in our social safety net never get fixed. Extensive research shows the vast majority of money problems are NOT due to irresponsible spending or lack of effort, but to emergencies and accidents just like ours. Our culture will try to make you feel like serious financial pitfalls are purely your fault, or that the inability to fix them is purely your fault. Know that the source of that shame is wrong, and 4 out of the 5 leading causes of bankruptcy are misfortune-related. If you can’t contribute monetarily, I would love if you shared the link to our page as well as these links to help educate people on the rising number of bankruptcies and the misfortune behind them.
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2009/06/bankruptcy_medical_costs.html
https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0310/top-5-reasons-people-go-bankrupt.aspx
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/top-10-reasons-people-go-_b_6887642
We are committed to paying everything forward. We know that any help we receive now we will work to repay by helping others when we are stable again. I hope that by risking embarrassment and judgement from few, a greater number will witness the personal cost of broken systems. Maybe in some small way, it will mean less people will have to go through these same struggles in the future. Thank you to everyone who took the time to read through this, and to everyone willing to help.
Sincerely, Lanier and Kelly
In the past 16 months, a snowball of emergency expenses have piled up to equal more than my entire salary.
Foremost, we experienced two major hospitalizations with extensive ongoing care. My wife is one of the strongest and most resilient people I’ve ever known, and she has taken a host of diagnoses in stride and with grace. As some close friends may know, this has changed our lives drastically since May of 2018. After that however, the blows did not stop coming. In 2019 we experienced two car accidents which totaled both of our vehicles, a botched recall case with the NHTSA, extensive damage in our home not remedied by previous homeowners, and the sudden mid-summer death of our AC unit which cost more than either car.
Despite all of this, our lives are far from a sob-story. We are happy and grateful to have already received so much generosity from family and friends. We’ve worked hard to cut back and take on more work, even with some temporary employment limitations imposed by illness. But even with 3 jobs and multiple side gigs between us, the bills still far outpace our income. Frequently, we have sacrificed our daily needs to try to keep up with payments. Our means are on track to run out completely by January. At this point, all I can do is chalk it up to really, really, really bad luck... and the utter absurdity that any person in our country should have to beg for money for medical care.
The listed amount is what remains of all these emergency expenses after our best efforts and the generosity of our family. We may not receive the full amount listed, but our goal is to hopefully have enough to get our monthly payments down to a manageable level - and weather the pitfalls that cause 4 out of 5 bankruptcies in the US.
I am also working on finding assistance programs, but find that many don’t offer help if the emergency expenses are already on credit, or there is a poverty-line income cap. If you have any advice, experience, or recommendations of additional assistance programs, please message me.
I also encourage anyone who is in the same boat to open up about financial struggle. It took me over a year to realize that shame surrounding finances is a toxic stigma that unfairly targets the middle class and below. Staying quiet means your problems only fester, but also means the gaping holes in our social safety net never get fixed. Extensive research shows the vast majority of money problems are NOT due to irresponsible spending or lack of effort, but to emergencies and accidents just like ours. Our culture will try to make you feel like serious financial pitfalls are purely your fault, or that the inability to fix them is purely your fault. Know that the source of that shame is wrong, and 4 out of the 5 leading causes of bankruptcy are misfortune-related. If you can’t contribute monetarily, I would love if you shared the link to our page as well as these links to help educate people on the rising number of bankruptcies and the misfortune behind them.
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2009/06/bankruptcy_medical_costs.html
https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0310/top-5-reasons-people-go-bankrupt.aspx
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/top-10-reasons-people-go-_b_6887642
We are committed to paying everything forward. We know that any help we receive now we will work to repay by helping others when we are stable again. I hope that by risking embarrassment and judgement from few, a greater number will witness the personal cost of broken systems. Maybe in some small way, it will mean less people will have to go through these same struggles in the future. Thank you to everyone who took the time to read through this, and to everyone willing to help.
Sincerely, Lanier and Kelly
Organizer
Lanier Nevling Smith
Organizer
West Columbia, SC