Help Alex and Katie Rebuild Throughout Bankruptcy

Hi, we are Alex and Katie, and we are asking for some help. Since 2022, we have accepted small amounts of help offered, but we have chosen to continually humble ourselves and not reach out for help when it is needed. We have reached a point where we need to recognize that asking for help is not a bad thing. Hopefully, we can continue to learn from this lesson in all aspects of life.

In August of 2022, we owned two restaurants that were failing rapidly but we held on hoping. We truly believed we would see the other side. During this time, we opted to eliminate health insurance from our business expenses. Of course, despite a challenging battle with infertility, this is also when Katie got pregnant and had a miscarriage. All of this happened uninsured, but we continued to believe that we could get our way out of the financial mess.

Shortly thereafter, on Christmas day, our house flooded and we were relocated to a hotel for 3.5 months. Throughout this time, we were generously given meals and other small gifts of time and money from some friends and family who were gracious to offer. We also struggled with severe short-staffing during this time at our business. We struggled to balance work and life as so much was happening at home and work and suffered many closed shifts and loss of profits as a result of the imbalance.

In November of 2023, our business could no longer adequately stand sufficiently on its own. We permanently closed both locations and both sought out new jobs. Of course, this came with a massive pay decrease when we were already behind on so many things due to sharing our expenses with the business. We poured out so much of our personal money into this business. Luckily, with new jobs, we would have health insurance after 30 days of working our new jobs. We had been without for 1.5 years.

During this month, Katie had her gallbladder emergently removed, which added to our medical debts significantly while we waited for our insurance plans to begin.

We had our Jeep stolen from our driveway shortly after that, and with being so behind on expenses, we chose to take the payout from insurance instead of replacing the car. This only lasted so long as we were so behind.

Our 1994 Cadillac runs great but ran into some issues this summer with the radiator. We were able to fix this by getting on a payment plan, but this soon became hard to manage as well. We needed both cars running so we could both work at different jobs.

We were able to recover slightly after that, but never caught up enough. Katie decided the best option for our future was to go back to school. Thankful for financial aid, she was able to do this while maintaining a part-time job. She has been getting straight A's and has proven that this venture was worth the effort.

This past summer, we decided to file for bankruptcy. Let me tell you, when you owned a business in the past, this process was messy, detailed, and overly complicated. We are set to officially declare our bankruptcy sometime next month. The difficulty and delay with this has been that our normal mortgage and other bills that have been behind will resume as normal the following month after filing. This is terrifying to us. We have become so far behind that we are unsure we will have what we need by then. However, our paychecks are garnished until we file as well. We have found ourselves in the middle of a sticky situation. To get to the other side, we need to be comfortable where we are currently. We cannot file bankruptcy a second time, and we do not want to lose our home. Rent for a 2-bedroom apartment costs the same, if not more, than our current mortgage anyway.

We are asking for help with financial rebuilding over the next month or two to help us settle and be able to move forward with bankruptcy to get us to the other side. Alex is starting a dream job next week that will pay him more than he has made since losing our restaurant. Katie has been hired by a nanny referral agency and is seeking part-time work to accompany her church job and her full-time student status.

We have tried too hard not to appear to need help, and at other times, appeared frantic with worry and insecurity. We believe that if we could just get a small amount of support in addition to our new jobs and begin paying the bankruptcy repayments, we should be able to get back to normal. We just do not have as much time as we would hoped to have had to get there. Katie has been in physical therapy for herniated discs in her neck, this will either go uninsured or delayed for February until we get the insurance for our new jobs. We need to feed ourselves and our sweet dog, pay our electric and gas bills, keep the internet on, and so much more that we once took for granted. If we could go back in time and recognize how lucky we were, we would. But we are here, and we could truly use your help.

Anything and everything helps - thank you for reading about our journey. We thank God that He brought you to this page.