Bouncing Back Financially

Money trouble shows up in a lot of forms. Theft. A business that folds. Debts you can't pay. Whatever the cause, the aftermath tends to feel the same: guilt, sadness, a kind of helplessness, anxiety, pulling away from people. I want to say something plainly at the start, because I lived it. You can recover from this. Almost anyone can. The one thing I'd warn against is hiding from the problem. Burying it only buys time you don't have.

My own story starts in 2007. I borrowed money and bought a batch of specialty goods, planning to sell them abroad at a profit. The first idea was an online store. We photographed every item, I bought a laptop to run the sales, and then I waited for high-speed internet to reach my area. It never did, or at least it kept looking less likely the longer I waited. So I shifted to selling directly, through friends and family, and made a few modest sales that way.

The loan payments, meanwhile, were slipping past due. A friend of mine was heading across the border, working as a waitress, and I asked whether her sister could sell some of the goods over there. I hesitated. I barely knew the sister and had no idea whether she'd be dependable. Still, I handed my friend a few items to carry over, with a promise: sell this first batch, send the money back, and I'll ship more.

The sister took one look at the products and was sure she could move all of them fast. She even phoned some friends in the country where she was working, and they committed to buying ahead of time and paying right away. She had a flight out the next morning, so we boxed everything up and took it to the post office. I covered the shipping and every excise tax that applied. Then she left. That was effectively the end of our dealings.

She sold every single item and sent me nothing. Not a nickel. It got worse from there: she was in another country, and my arthritis made travel impossible, so I had no way to reach her in person. With the money my goods had earned, she opened her own shops selling the same kind of merchandise. Within a couple of years she was rich. Jewelry, cars, whatever she felt like buying. When I tried to contact her, she blocked my number, and that happened right as I hit the worst financial stretch of my life. I still owed the loan for the merchandise. On top of that were my children's school fees, medical bills, utilities, rent, the whole list. Figuring out how to cover all of it became the only thing I thought about.

I use a wheelchair because of the arthritis. I suspect that disability is exactly what made her think she could cheat me and get away with it. But my head is clear, and there are plenty of ways to bring in money that don't depend on my legs. During the hard years I taught my children to use everything we had and waste nothing. I cashed out investments as I needed to. I hired a few people to bake and sell goods with us. We renovated the house and rented out one half of it to help cover the bills.

Eventually the high-speed connection I'd once waited on arrived, and I started freelancing as an online article writer. Bit by bit the money came back. We're reasonably stable again now. My children are close to finishing their education, and everything we went through together taught them some hard lessons I'm counting on them to carry forward.

If you've lost money, or you're just stuck in a tight spot financially, take stock of what you actually have around you, even the small things. That's where it starts. You can bounce back.