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Ruby & Bradley
Lani & Kym
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real life stories
> Lani & Kym
Lani & Kym
Life before we came to CAP was a struggle. We were trying to pay our bills but every now and then we’d slip and not pay one and in time it would all accumulate. It was those times that you didn’t want to wake up in the morning. You didn’t want to have to deal with it, you just wanted to run away from it and the more we ran from it the deeper it got for us. It was a mental struggle, having to do deal with “Have you paid that?”, or “Do I have to pay that?” We found ourselves broke by Sunday, and then payday came 3 more days later.
It was hard to watch the kids not have lunch for school – just little things like that broke us. I earned quite a fair bit of money on a weekly basis, but we never knew where that went. By the end of the week we had nothing to show for it or anything to say where it went, which would cause a lot of fights between us two. As time went on, it got worse and worse and you just didn’t want to get up in the morning and face it. We’d wake up and find ourselves running, closing up the house, locking everything down, pretending we weren’t at home. We were just hiding in the house.
The debt made us feel helpless and incompetent. Even though we wouldn’t show it to everyone else, it was the most tiring thing. It was spiritually tiring, mentally tiring because you know what’s going on and you can’t focus on one thing at a time. Everyone looks at you like you’ve got everything sorted, you’ve got everything sussed. But nobody really knew the inside. Nobody really knew that we were going downhill. We were in debt to the point where we could have got evicted. We painted a pretty picture more or less to others and I wanted to keep that picture but I had to make a choice, a stronger choice in ringing CAP and getting them in to help us financially with all our bills and budgeting.
"To this very day I’m so glad that we made that phonecall. It took a lot of stress off us, it took a lot of things away. We didn’t even realise there was a heavy burden that was sitting there until CAP came in and then they just took it away. We didn’t have to worry about power having to get paid and all those sorts of things, it was quite releasing.When CAP came to visit us, I’d never seen a budget form set down. I was nervous I didn’t know what to expect. There’s a stigma out there about budgeters that you lose all control and you have no say – that was our fear. And that’s why it was hard. But it’s not even like that.
They opened our eyes and we saw a lot of things that could be changed. It wasn’t until they left, we were jumping up and down in circles and clapping in the air. If I could say it, visually you could almost see that burden lift. We knew from that first visit that we needed to carry on with it. I think the biggest change was accepting the fact that we were getting somewhere, we were actually moving. We went from $60 a week for food for five kids and two adults to $250 a week. None of the changes or the sacrifices that we made after CAP stepped in were hard for us, because we were already at the bottom.
There’s debt that’s sitting there that’s been hanging on our shoulders for a good 11 years that just hasn’t gone away. And now that CAP’s involved, half of those debts are gone. We can see the bigger picture of everything being wiped, everything being cleared. That drives me, to know that we’re going to be debt free. We have savings, we’ve never had savings. I look forward to getting up in the morning. I can open the curtains and not worry about having debt collectors knocking on the door. I don’t know what I would have done without CAP. They have been life-changing for us. We have a hope we have a target and a vision that we can move towards. And we’ve never had that before. We never had a target or a vision to move towards. And CAP gave it to us.
