We are blessed for you support and are not evicted

Hi all,

My name is Travis, and my wife and I are trying to fundraise so we might stay at these apartments long enough to find a more affordable place to live.

The short story is we are 3 months back on rent and don't have the income to even pay the rent each month. My wife has Stage 5 kidney disease, COPD on oxygen is blind in one eye and has mobility issues. I take care of her full-time (unpaid) and she gets $914 a month for SSI.

We owe $3264 by March 15th or we are evicted.

How we got to where we are at, aka., the long story.

About a year before Chelle was diagnosed with kidney disease, her mother, Beverley, had decided to move in with us so she had someone around to help her out. She was living on her own since her husband passed away and was not doing great. The motivation to live together was because Beverley had just gone to the hospital for dehydration and malnutrition.

Chelle and I decided to move into a 2 bedroom apartment and have her move in with us. I was working full-time, and Chelle was staying home to help with her mom. Beverley had income, I had income. Chelle was not in terrible health, although her back is messed up from an old auto accident and she could not stand for very long. This was working well until about the time COVID hit.

Less than a month before COVID was declared a pandemic, Chelle was diagnosed with stage 5 kidney disease. She had other health concerns happen before the diagnosis that led up to it. She was getting short of breath and was diagnosed with COPD. She is currently on oxygen full-time now. She also had gone blind in one eye. She had decided to do in-home peritoneal dialysis but we had to wait for surgery due to the COVID pandemic. Beverley was having health issues at this time as well and was hospitalized earlier in the year for about 6 months due to a surgeon unknowingly hitting an artery in her arm while trying to check her heart and put a stint in. It turned into compartment syndrome and she lost the use of her right arm.

So when COVID hit, my employer stayed open as a retail computer store selling "essential" items for the pandemic. They were not following CDC guidelines and did not keep the proper social distancing, furnish an appropriate amount of disinfectant, and went over capacity for indoors. People were coughing and sneezing everywhere and I had to deal with the public. Chelle was at high risk with her Kidney Disease and COPD. My mother-in-law was high risk with her heart issues, and I have severe allergies and asthma which I take daily medication for. I did not feel comfortable working in the environment so when they offered voluntary resignation with unemployment benefits, I took it.

This was a blessing in many ways at this time, I was able to take Beverley to her doctor appointments and when Chelle had her surgery later that summer for a catheter to be put in, I was able to stay home and take care of her with her dialysis treatments. Her dialysis is 4 times a day with about 3 hours in between treatments. I was on unemployment until that ran out. I had been told by many people that I could get paid to be a caregiver and was searching for income in this regard. Due to me being married to Chelle, I am not eligible for income as a caregiver for her. Spouses are not paid for caregivers in Michigan.

In September of 2021, I was in full swing on Chelles dialysis and Beverley's friend couldn't take her to this appointment. Beverley had gone out to a doctor's appointment where she received a ride from the service provided by the doctor. She came home from the doctor on heavy pain medication. She said she had fallen and wasn't feeling too good. She went to lay down and a short while later got up to go to the bathroom. After about 10 minutes she had not come out of the bathroom and I went to go check on her. She was slouched over the toilet and had defecated all over. She was not talking very coherently so we called 911 and she went to the hospital. She was never in her right mind after the pain medication the doctor's office had put her on.

While Beverley was in the hospital they moved her to many different rooms and she was in ICU. While she was there, they had dropped her while she was using the commode and she cracked her skull on some plumbing in the bathroom. She passed away a few days later. In hindsight, we should have had an autopsy. Chelle did not want to pursue a lawsuit since she was upset at losing her mom, and we had just gone through a year of trying to get a lawsuit for compartment syndrome with no success.

At this time, the unemployment ran out, we were no longer assisted with rent from Beverley. We were able to get pandemic assistance with the rent, and have started receiving food assistance. I applied for a Section 8 housing choice voucher in February of 2022 and we are still on that waitlist. The pandemic assistance ran out in October and we were now facing $1025 a month in rent, plus our electric, internet, and phone bills. At this time Chelle was making about $840 a month from SSI.

This is the part where I wish I knew better and someone would have implored me to find another place to live. Maybe some had and I didn't listen, but the organizations I would call to get assistance with the rent all said I had to get approved for State Emergency Relief before they can help with rent. To get approved for State Emergency Assistance, I had to be facing eviction and have legal action started against me. I was naive. I was never informed and did not research well enough to know that this funding is limited and the help is temporary. I did not know that it would be such a long process to get help.

Without this knowledge, I did what I thought was the right thing to do, and got myself an eviction notice so we could start getting help. I went to court and got free legal aid. From there they gave us about 2 weeks to come up with the money for our next court date. Our next court date comes around, which was January 26th.

We searched for funds and got approval for State Emergency Relief. State Emergency relief would only pay about $500 of the roughly $3000 debt we had. I also had an electric bill in this application that they would help out with once we came up with the $2500. Chelle and I had about $1000 so we were looking for about $1500. We found some help at a local church and had a meeting with them a few days before court. They rushed to meet with their committee and would try to get back to us as soon as possible. Usually, they meet at the end of the month, but they were hustling to help our cause. They were able to get us funds, but it was too late, or so we thought.

Chelle and I log in to the Zoom call for court about 30 minutes early so we don't get missed and we have no issues. This was an issue. I can only think we were there too early because the court clerk and our attorney both did not know where were there. We waited in the lobby, got pulled into court for our ruling and never got to say or talk to anyone. We were muted and ignored. Once they said our decision we were ejected from the Zoom call. From what it sounded like, we were not given the option to pay the remainder of the rent and we had to be out by February 15th no matter what. This was later confirmed by my attorney who called later that day and asked why we weren't at court and she called to let us know we had to be out. We had funds later that day from a local church and I had to tell them we couldn't use the funds.

I called the legal aid complaint line and was directed to the CEO. It took a little while for the paperwork to get to her office so she could see the ruling and help me out with understanding the decision and seeing what they could do. It was just a couple of days before the deadline when it got sorted out and we were able to extend our eviction by 30 days by paying $1000. We had to borrow a little bit but had most of the money since we were planning on living in a motel.

We also had to pay our past due electric bill since our power had been shut off.

To reapply for State Emergency Relief I had to wait for the current one to "fall off" I did this, but since the electricity was past due again and we spent all our money on extending rent, I had to apply for State Emergency Relief for the electric bill. I was not going to bundle it with rent again as it may get held up and our power shut off. The process before had not taken very long to get the electricity paid as I had done it a couple of times before.

This time it was different. I have been trying to get our case worker to call me back for almost an entire month to just get help with the electric bill. I have been calling and the messages have been going up the chain where the supervisor and the supervisor to the supervisor were receiving emails regarding my case. At least according to the people on the phone. They had just changed the program this year and you are now being helped by a group of caseworkers to better serve our needs. To me feels like no one is held accountable now, so nothing gets done. We were able to talk to our case worker and have had a fairly quick turnaround time for contact in the past. Not so much anymore. It wasn't until yesterday that I got a call back from my caseworker and she had approved assistance for the electric bill. I let her know I would be applying for Rental assistance again, however, there is not enough time for this process as we only have until the 15th to get the money for our landlord or be evicted. It is now the 9th.

We have been trying to find a place to live with no luck. I was still trying to get help from organizations and now they are all telling me I need to be homeless before they can help me find a home. Currently, we are on a couple of waitlists for subsidized housing that say they are 3-6 months wait. Many places we are calling are not taking applications. We do not meet the income requirements for even an apartment that cost $540 a month. At this time, we have been unable to pay our credit card debt as well and I will be and have been sued for these debts. I am still working on that as well, but funding the living situation is imperative.

We are still searching for places to live and I expect we will get into subsidized or affordable place in the near future. I fear that Chelle will not survive being homeless and our situation has become dire. I am applying for employment to transcribe online which would be a flexible job I could do while taking care of Chelle. I am also doing online content creation. I had started a podcast but had to put it on the shelf due to stress and depression with the housing situation. Once we are in a place where we don't have to worry about making ends meet I intend on bouncing back with the podcast, creating more online multimedia such as a Twitch live stream, youtube videos, tiktok, instagram etc. I have so many great ideas and the sproutling of an amazing community that I feel this could be a way I could tend to Chelle and have supplemental if not primary income in the future. I also intend on starting a Patreon to try and generate monthly income so I can follow my dream of being a stay-at-home caregiver for Chelle and an online content creator.

If you have read this far, I thank you so very much for your time. Please know that we are working as hard as we can to keep this situation from happening again in the future and working on getting back into living within our means.

I am forever grateful for your time, your prayers, and if you can, your donation.

We may not be doing everything right, and there are many things we could/should do better or differently, but we are truly doing the best we can with what we are trying to overcome.

So thank you again, and even if we don't reach the goal, it will still go to a good cause at helping us stay off the street if we are evicted and we can rent a motel and storage.

(Chelle hates having her photo taken so we had to take a goofy one)