Barbara Twogood
Twogood Tidbits

It is hard to turn to any form of media these days without hearing about the doom and gloom of the financial state our country is in. Most often it is the loss of more jobs, the rising cost of gas and its effects, or the growing threat of mortgage foreclosure.

If you have never been one of the many citizens that live paycheck to paycheck, maybe these stories don’t affect you, but they should. Fate has a way of sneaking up on those with blinders and knocking them to their knees when they least expect it.

I have been there — Living each day, dreading the phone calls of collectors while working as many as three jobs, and not seeming to make a dent in the debt that kept mounting. We had vehicles that always seemed to need something and so you had to “rob Peter to pay Paul” to get them back on the road again; sometimes you lost precious work time that amounted to a smaller paycheck.

The other fear that always looms is that of a medical emergency. We went years without medical insurance for me and our boys. We were in that “grey area” where they didn’t qualify for any of existing government programs. I learned which social agencies to turn to that, for instance, would help them acquire glasses.

This was also a time when it was so easy to get a credit card and use them to cover the vehicle costs as well as weekly groceries. But several were maxed out by using the card’s cash-option to pay for other bills.

It was a never-ending cycle of trying to beat the bank; but eventually, it catches up to you.

Of course this way of life has its toll on a family. My boys were use to wearing “hand-me-downs” or whatever I’d buy from thrift stores. They also were the last, if ever, to get any of the popular items that all their friends had.

Then we got behind on the bank payments for our vehicle and our accounts were all frozen. No way to pay for anything, including gas or food or even our mortgage. It was a very scary time. It seemed that things just kept getting worse when we got the foreclosure notice. In only a few months, we could have been homeless!

We realized that the only way to save the roof over our head was to file for bankruptcy. It is not a solve-all fix, but it does offer a temporary solution to a bigger problem.

If you don’t change your lifestyle, however, things are not really any better.

Needless to say, this eventually was just a part of the end of the marriage and this is not that uncommon. It also has been known to lead to a lot more problems, such as domestic violence or drug problems.

I’m fortunate that life has been good to me and I was able to move on, but I do not take the blessings that I enjoy today for granted!

Barbara Twogood, who moved to Texas in 2002 from her birthplace of Erie, Pa. — and whose claim to fame is once being the mayor of a small Pennsylvania borough — is one of five Herald “Writer’s Block” writers. She can be reached at: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it