More fun news from the Department of Kicking You While You're Down

So I may have mentioned before that Chase cut my credit lines a few months ago. This pissed me off because my balances were in fact going down and I hadn't put anything on the cards in months. This made my overall balance-to-limit ratio look really bad, because I had my two cards with the biggest limits at Chase. Today I got a nice thin letter from Discover, stating that they'd done the same damn thing, except they cut it to within $150 of my current balance, instead of the $500-750 that Chase had done. And I bet I know why they did it.. drumroll please...

Because I took out a CareCredit no-interest veterinary card so I could PAY FOR MY DEAD GUINEA PIG'S SURGERY. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, one of my guinea pigs had a medical emergency and required immediate surgery, and died the next morning, and I didn't exactly have $850 rattling around in my pocket... because.. drumroll please...

Because my boyfriend got fired the week before and until he gets his unemployment we are paying the mortgage using the money he got from his tax return for buying the house, which we'd been saving since we may have to sell the house before the tax return is repaid to the government.

Fucking hooray.

So my beloved pet is dead after a horrifying, bloody, and fairly sudden illness, our household income has been halved, and Discover thinks this is a fantastic time to eliminate the very last vestiges of any financial flexibility I might have and cut my credit line to nothing. Fantastic.

Let's just hope nothing else goes wrong (my job is sound, so no worries there) or I will be pulling money out of my retirement accounts. I don't have much other than that right now since between all the debt and the veterinary expenses and the house and the oh yeah buying food, we don't have any cushion left.

It's really hard to have any optimism about my situation right now. I'm usually fatally optimistic - I even joked that my guinea pig had the kindness to die $400 earlier than I thought she would (a week in the vet hospital costs as much as the surgery itself.) But I've just about had it.

I'm trying to take on as many mystery shopping assignments as I can, and we've stopped eating out unless we can keep it under $20 for both of us. We've started having our friend get togethers at a place with half-priced appetizers before 7. I'm not spending any money on BrainMarket right now (although Boyfriend does now have time to work on the website. See, there I go with the optimism.) But it just isn't denting the real problems much - how do you earn an extra mortgage payment each month out of mystery shopping? I'm even thinking of trying to get a second (well I guess third, after CashDuck) job and do ten hours on the weekend to make any kind of dent.

At least we're better at the unemployment website now.