$guru appt

Whew, it was nowhere near as bad as I thought. Last time I was seeing the $guru about the last financial catastrophe, I was in there for over an hour. My disaster spread across the large table. This time was more like a fireside chat.

Perhaps the debt isn't so bad in the context of average family debt in Australia? The money isn't a lot I suppose looking at it like that. There's just the minor detail that we have no money.

So the alternatives are as follows:

Declare bankruptcy, always the last choice.

Get fuckin Centrelink happening with David. No, they still haven't rung him yet for the finally finalising the last bit of the entire claim. Also, now that he has his birth cert for ID, and a three month print out of his bank account with nothing in it, he can go up there and get a low income health care card on the spot. Also, now that he has his birth cert for ID, he can apply for the Carers Allowance over me; a very small payment of about $50 a week to help with looking after someone who's sick. Well I am fucked aren't I. And he's a nurse......   I used to get this same payment for my late wife.

Go to the bank and ask to have my credit card updated to a newer one from the same bank at a much less interest rate. I've never worried about the interest rate on the thing as it's always been paid off, but it's fuckin 20% or something outrageous. As a longstanding customer of theirs, a request to change cards may well succeed. We shall see on that one.

Something about you can get $10,000 out of my Superannuation to throw at the debt, after doing some spectacular hoop jumping I expect. Will wait and see how it all works out before considering that. I mean FFS, I can draw on my super in about 4.5 years anyway.

So it was a very productive meeting.

There was one very interesting thing that came out of it. Last time I was able to pay off a $30,000 or so debt by drawing on my Super under the thing that the debt was having an impact on my health, as stress is incredibly bad for an HIV+ person. The legislation hasn't changed on that, but the Abbott gov has come up with some new rules in April. Rules that the $guru can't see even with a Freedom Of Information request to Abbott's "open" gov. So they can now deny somehow all requests to get money out of Super under these new rules that nobody can see.

The $guru's position was that in providing proof from highly qualified health professionals that the stress of debt was affecting people's health with HIV, it was unconscionable that a gov bureaucrat that wasn't a doctor could overturn the request of high up health professionals in the biggest hospitals in Australia to give them access to their Super to pay off debt. It's all before the Commonwealth Ombudsman at the moment.