This is the first article in the series of my weekly FILAM (F-inancial IL-literacy A-nd M-istakes) articles. I hope that this article will help my readers understand how I got into a financial mess. Each article will be followed by a post within the same week discussing some lessons, resolutions or just plain related financial articles.

Success lies in the eyes of the beholder. Am I a success now? Well, in my own standards, I felt that I am when it comes to my finances. I’ve got out of huge credit card debts, learned how to live a frugal life, able to contribute to my retirement, and started a few investments. I do not mean to brag, I’m just elaborating the fact that I used to be broke and thought of filing for bankruptcy, but managed to hang on instead. Every success story has its humbling beginnings and here is mine.

America is still considered by many as the land of opportunity and the land of immigrants that’s why a lot of people are still dying to come here. Every first generation immigrants has their own story to tell about their struggle in the beginning. I’m sure that your parents or grandparents have told you about how your ancestors struggled when they just arrived here.

Our family migrated here from the Philippines in 1990 when I was only seventeen. When we came here, we barely had anything, my mom probably had around $1,000 saved up but that’s about it. Initially, we stayed at one of my uncle’s house that happened to have a big family like ours. We are a family of seven and they’re of eight living in a three bedroom house. And you know how that worked, three weeks later, they kicked us out because of monetary problems. Well, I guessed, I can’t blame them because it was really hard to feed fifteen mouths with just one salary. We ended up staying with my second uncle for another two weeks while we were looking for a place on our own.

We couldn’t find a job yet because we were still waiting for our social security card. As soon as we received those, my dad found a job but it was only part-time and only paid $500 a month. Thus, my two siblings and I, who were minors but were eligible to work, started looking for a job as well. Because we were only teenagers, we had to settle for menial jobs and that’s how we landed at McDonalds. We were making minimum wage ($4.25 per hour) at that time and each one of us were netting $600 per month. My mom was a stay at home mom back in our country so she kept that role because we still had a four year old brother and a fourteen year old sister that she had to take care of. In addition, my mom had not work for at least 18 years and making her work then, especially in a different culture, would be a major shock for her.

When we tried looking for a place to rent, landlords denied our applications since we did not establish our credit yet and we’d been working for only a few weeks. So we had no choice but to accept the expensive rental house of my second uncle that cost $1,000 per month (on a rental market where you can avail $800 for a three bedroom apartment). To him, business is business and there are no discounts offered to relatives. On the bright side, he did not charge us a security deposit. With rent expense of a $1,000, that left us with only $1,200 to feed the entire family and cover the rest of our expenses. We did not own any cars so we saved the money that we would otherwise spend on gas, insurance, monthly payments and any maintenance or repair. We walked to work and rode a bus if we had to go some place further.

I had to admit, we were pretty naïve as to what type of help that we can obtain at that time so we sucked it up and live with that low income. We came from a country that does not offer financial assistance the way the US government does to its low income household so our mentality was that if we are going to make it here then we really have to do it on our own without those kind of financial help.

Lesson or mistake: Being ignorant with the help that’s available to us.
I’m not telling this story so you can feel sorry for our family or blame my relatives. The fact that my relatives provided us temporary shelter was a big help by itself even if it’s only a few weeks. After all that we’ve been through, I felt that we were still fortunate because we live in a country where there were unlimited opportunities if you are willing to work hard for it. And that no matter how hard we struggled, I always kept in mind that there are a million people out there that are willing to trade places with us because we are here in the US. The main point that I was trying to make is this: We weren’t aware of the government financial assistance available for families like us back then. I wonder how many people are like us and not getting help. That’s why my next post will discuss various government assistances for people like us.

Image by Genesearch.com