Six years ago was a very different place. My wife, Joy, and I were embarking on an adventure. We sold our home, purchased an RV, and embarked on the road. Little could we know what would happen in only a year. The adventure quickly changed to uncertainty when Covid shut everything down. Now only was mobility out of the picture, but my income as a writer dropped precipitously. 

Over the next four years we managed to hold our own, however debt quickly began to pile up. When you run short, credit cards are sometimes the only option. Not the best, of course. Especially as the payments begin to further erode your situation. We found work in RV parks and hustled to make ends meet. Friends helped by giving us a cheap place to park the house. I took part time work, then full time work, eventually exploring returning to my old career in logistics. The one good thing Covid created was remote work opportunities. I found an excellent job, and while remote, we decided we needed a stable home. Safer and with fewer day-to-day challenges. Things looked better.

Then fate struck once more. Our 2016 Ram pickup (a 1-ton dually necessary to pull our home) had a catastrophic engine failure. An expensive repair bloomed into a major repair, and then got worse. No matter how we looked at it, replacing the truck was worse than dropping untold thousands into it. While we'd begun the search for a home, we hadn't yet found one, which means the truck was essential. A replacement would be $50k, minimum. 

When it was all over, we put over $20k into credit cards and personal loans for a new engine, all the things that went with that, and weeks in a rental car. Even with all that, we managed to scrape up enough to make the move to a house. The debt was manageable, and we found a home. 

The house is in Indiana, where Joy is near her aging parents. 105 years old, it needs a lot of work, which we've got experience doing and family to help. We're repairing/refurbishing the 1st floor and planning on the 2nd floor in a year or so. But it would seem the bad luck wasn't quite done. 

This time it was a hole in the oil pan from debris (didn't even know it had happened), and AC going out (necessary in Indiana's coming summer), a damaged transmission cooler, and worse of all, the EGR (exhaust gas cooler) was leaking coolant. Intermittently, and a lot. 

Well, this run of repairs is topping $3,000 just after we closed on the house (which also cost extra because of the bank), and we're tapped out. Faced with living in a house without appliances and the aftermath of the previous owners neglect, or asking for help, here I am. I've avoided doing this for quite a while until my friends finally convinced me to do it. The worst part has been the stress making it nearly impossible to write, and that hurts.

We've got a lot in accumulated debt, but if we can get enough cash, we can finish the work on the truck, get the house habitable, and finally breath a sigh of relief. Given a couple years, and aggressively saving money (lots of beans and rice in our future), we can retire the shorter term debt and come out the other side. In only 5 years, we'll only have two payments remaining, and one goes away 3 years after that, leaving only the house. 

I'm asking for your help, if you can, or prayers if you cannot, so we can get our new home habitable and safe. There's a lot we want to do to the home, but we've cut it back to the minimum of redoing the kitchen (it was bad) and appliances, as there are none. The furnace works, but we need to get it inspected, and we haven't tried the hot water heater yet. The water only finally got fixed a couple days ago. 

Thank you for whatever you can do, we are very grateful.