MyBitch on MyBudget...

This post has been sitting in my edits for a few weeks, only coz I hadn't finished it, but I'm finishing it now to publish, coz many out there seem to be getting the wrong impression of what's got me down.  By comments left on the posts following me talking about ex's, there seems to be a mistaken impression that that person holds all the power, not so....
Soooo....my heads outta the sand, no more emu, no more blinkers...

We're in debt, and we're down deep.

When we had Jack, I asked Tyler to take over the finances.  I felt it was finally a time I could get him to "be the man" and "wear the pants", mostly though, I just didn't want to be one of "those wives"...... We used to be friends with a couple, who are still together today to my disgust(coz he's a disgusting cheater with the theory that "what she doesn't know, won't hurt her"), but she wore the pants in the family.  She wore them so tight, she carried his balls in her purse.  They had a joint bank account, that he apparently had limited access to, and every payday she gave him a smidge of "play money" around $20.  Yep, a grown man, and this was his situation :-0

I swore, this was never gonna be us, nah uh girlfriend. 

But it seems, no matter how hard you try to re-route the path, the destination is still the same :(

Similarly, I was annoyed watching from the outside of a relationship, the "ball and chain" wife managing to shake him of all his friends....swore I'd never do this, never did, but got labelled that by all the mates he chose to drop.....arrh, ya can't win!!

We've never had a joint bank account(except for one we opened to save for a house deposit and it's kinder growing cobwebs, whoops)....and probably totally coz of my fear of my husband having a view of me being controlling.

When we were freshly living together, I connected everything and dealt with the bills, simply coz I'd lived outta home before and knew how to do it, where as it was new to Tyler(and I think, as with many aspects  of adult responsibilities, he took for granted that he could transfer it from his mum to his girlfriend/wife!)
When I was in hospital with newborn Jack, we were concerned of what costs we would wear of his impending operation.  Tyler came in one visit and told me everything would be fine and he had gotten a credit card.  At the time, he explained to me that this was a debit type of credit card, meaning you needed to put cash on it first, but that he had a small amount of credit to help with hospital and ambulance transfer costs(which turned out to all be covered under Medicare).
This credit card has remained active, although I was always led to the impression it was purely a debit card, and on weeks that he said "there's no room on the credit card", I thought that just meant he hadn't put cash onto it.  Boy, was I wrong!  I was so horribly, chokingly, wrong :(
I had been noticing more and more that we were getting reminders and late payment notices on our bills, I'd questioned him, and he always assured me things were under control.
I thought if i let it go, for his prides sake perhaps, he would manage to get on top again.  It wasn't until I started to look around at our peers that I realised just how much we were under-achieving for our age, how many friends had bought a house, or simply....how full their fridges were compared to ours! ;-S
Calling him on it wasn't getting anywhere, it was all deny deny deny, so I plunged into the deep end of ways to fix it and I gave MyBudget a call.
MyBudget, according to their ads on telly, are a company who will consolidate your debts and help you get back on top of it all.
When I told Tyler I had arranged a meeting with them, I expected him to say I was over reacting, but he conceded defeat and welcomed it.  As it turned out, they needed to speak to him on the phone first, saying that they need a basic run down of the debt in order to make the appointment. 
The morning of the appointment, he flawed me with a gob smacking confession.....that credit card was not in fact a debit only card, it was a full on credit card, and we were in the poo!!
Eeeeeek!!
Looking around, we have nothing worthy to show for this debt, no fancy items adorning our house, no new clothes on our bodies, and our family car has it's own debt, so that wasn't where it'd all gone.  It was just unbelievable.  All the money we owed on it and nothing special to show for it.
We still went into the meet with the woman of MyBudget with confidence she was going to be able to help us get rid of all the mess, and find a way to get out of the rental market.
Wrong, so so so wrong.
MyBudget is the biggest scam going around.  If you are in financial crisis and were considering using them, run, run far away from them!!!
What's the deal with them? 
Firstly, they wanted almost $40 a week for them to manage our debt for us.  Wow, $40 a week?  Much better spent on going towards that debt!
Then, the lady firstly looked at things we paid out for Jack.  Yeah yeah, I know it's all good and well to say activities for our tot aren't essential, but man I'd just been confessed to about this freakin huge debt, cut me some slack if I felt Jack should be the last to suffer for it :(
The process of breaking down to her all the things we owed and the amounts in our bank accounts was awful, humiliating, I began to cry.
She told us to go and have a break and come back in half and hour while she worked on a budget for us.  Stupidly, she advised us to go buy a coffee at the local cafe while we waited.....umm yeah, with the trillions of dollars we just told you we have!! grrr
We just went back and sat in our car.  Immediately, I told Tyler not to expect me to go back in there with him.  If I hadn't felt so pissed off, my heart was screaming for him not to go back in either, that he had suffered enough humiliation.  
Upon his return after the second half of the session, it was all becoming clear that it was a waste of time, and false advertisement.
That was when he explained their weekly fee, and he also showed me a basic run down of the proposed budget. 
The plan also entailed us needing to forward each bill to them, and if it was higher then an estimated amount, the whole budget would need to be re-worked.
She told Tyler that apart from a small amount of grocery and petrol allowance, all our wage would be deposited straight into a bank account that they controlled, and that things such as birthday presents and the like would require a 2 week notice to them that we required more of our own money!!
Amongst the bills we took to show her was our car rego, due in a months time.  Tyler had already assured me he would take care of that with his tax return.  This woman came up with a suggestion that we ask family to borrow the money for it, then take what we owe them onto the bottom of the list.  Further, Tyler had been working out a budget with a mate at work, he had said his own budget allowed for the credit card debt to be paid within 2 years.  The MyBudget solution was a ridiculously small weekly payment, that would not only see the credit card incurring higher interest, but be stretched out over a 5-6 year period.

Oh my golly gosh.
These are supposed to be professional debt experts, professional budget makers!!
All we could figure from our experience was that they were going to succeed in driving us further into debt, into further trouble.
Needless to say, we're going it alone, trying to fix all this mess up ourselves.
I have, reluctantly, applied for some jobs that can be of minimal effect to Jack's time with either parent, so that he is still in the care of at least one of us(Tyler actually isn't in favor of this, saying he doesn't expect me to give up being up sahm, but I felt I had to at least try, even temporarily).  I have started to search for a smaller, more economical family car(really, if we had known we'd be full time baby wearers, we need never have upgraded!).  And of course, had I known about our debt, I wouldn't have been spending so freely, so now that I know our situation, I'm thinking over purchases more.
Hopefully things start looking up for our family!!
If you are having money troubles, please please, don't put your lives in the hands of MyBudget, it is a nasty scam.