So a little bit of information about what has happened in the last year. The Saturday before Labor Day of 2021 I had about 5 minutes left of papers to throw, when I fell asleep at the wheel. I ran into a tree and totaled my 2004 GMC Envoy.

I was working way too much by doing 5,000 papers every Saturday for about 4 years at the time. I gave up 3,000 of the papers because my life was way more important and so was my daughters (who was in the car with me). I am so grateful I was not on a main street, and I am even more grateful I didn’t harm anyone else. I lost $1,000.00 a month of income by doing this, but I made it work. For the next two months I had to pay for a rental vehicle which was very costly, just because of miscommunication and not knowing I had full coverage on the vehicle. They only gave me $2,300.00 for my vehicle. I finally was able to get another vehicle by the end of October I purchased a 2010 Ford Escape, and first night I took it out on the route it broke down. I took it back to the used car dealer, and they were nice enough to let me trade it out for a 2012 Chrysler Town and Country. I thought by paying a little more I was getting a better vehicle. Boy was I wrong. Within a week the fuel pump relay went on the vehicle costing me $500.00 to fix. Then just about like clockwork every 2 weeks or so something else went wrong. So for the next 6 months I was constantly fixing on the car and spent around 8 to 9 thousand dollars doing so. While all of this was going on I was going and having 4-5 of my teeth pulled every month until they were all taken out. Just bad genetics, but also a hefty bill with all this going on. I was supposed to have my new teeth by the end of the summer, but that has been delayed as well.

On June 26th I had picked up my papers as I do every night, as I work 7 days a week. It was raining hard and it was very hard to see, and I was driving on interstate 94. I was almost at the Eastwood, Allard exit when all of the sudden it felt like I ran into someone, and it was an enormous amount of water. My van shut off quickly and never started again. I called 911 and they told me I might want to leave my vehicle, because they weren’t coming and told me good luck. I grabbed my purse, put it over my head and walked through what I found out later wasn’t just rain water, it was also sewage water as well. I was almost waist deep in water there was water shooting up from the manholes on the side of the road. Thankfully my daughter and boyfriend came out in the storm and came and got me. I went home changed my clothes and by the time I got back to my vehicle the water was almost gone. My daughter and a Good Samaritan pushed the van to the side of the road, and the police were nice enough to let me drive the wrong way down the freeway so that I could move the papers from my van to my daughters Blazer. Grosse Pointe was still flooded pretty bad at that point so I had to wait until about one in the afternoon, and went and delivered the papers to my customers. I had called roadside who took almost 10 hours to show up, however by then the police had already towed my van to the impound.. I found out later when I got home from delivering papers around 6 or so and the van in the driveway was not my own. I got that all worked out finally, and it took 3 weeks for them to declare my van a total loss. So between what I paid for the vehicle and what I had to put into it was almost $20,000.00. I was very happy I had enough sense to have comprehensive coverage and they gave me $7500.00 for my van. So I at least I had something to go towards a new vehicle. Also on top of waiting for this to go through my landlord told me that he ran into financial trouble, and he had to sell his house. So he told me and my family he needed to live in the house we were renting from him within 30 days. We were at the time month to month because our initial 2 year lease had been up for a year and a half and he didn’t redo a lease mostly because of the issues with Covid 19. So as I was moving the last week of July my mother who is only 65 had a heart attack, and had to have a double bypass. I am so very grateful that she made it through everything and is doing well.

This past year has not only been very rough financial for me, but also just emotionally draining, and one thing just keeps coming after another. I am hopefully though that now that I am in a new place, and have a somewhat newer car with a good warranty that things will get better. I will have to go without some things for a while so that I can get this new vehicle paid off, because I did not at all see this coming.