I hate money stress, but SO glad my cat is better.

[moriah]

I have one credit card. It is for gas when it has no balance to stay active, or emergencies. It has a $750 limit. Keeping its balance low has helped my credit score, and when my score is better I do want to see if I can get one other -- maybe use it for streaming services and pay it off like I usually do the gas. I've been told that helps the score after the initial dive in credit age, etc.

I had to replace my tires, and had that card to use and pay it off -- but my insurance renewed when the balance was too high and it went way up. When I paid it off, next renewal the rate went back down. It's a conspiracy to keep people poor, I tell you.

Last month my cat gave me a horrible scare -- he had about 12 hours where he threw up, then went completely off his food. Not wet food, anything There's only so long cats can go without eating, but it's a very non-specific symptom. It hit the 72 hour mark. I have a vet that I can normally get into with reasonable rates, but they couldn't see him, but they agreed he needed to be seen immediately. So I called as many vets as I could, and one was able to get him in. Woot!

But when they got done.. ran a bunch of tests and what they diagnosed him/treated him for was a UTI -- they gave him a 2-week antibiotic shot and an anti-nausea/abdominal pain injection. despite his urine only showing the ketones for going so long without eating (his urine was far too concentrated and dark, and a UTI could have caused the issues). He's 7 now, and I've had a cat that had PU surgery. When she said he needed to be on prescription urinary food, I knew it was better than paying thousands for surgery.

The cost, though.... I'd managed to put $150 in savings, and had moved to my checking as well as brought my card. It's a good thing I did, because the bill for everything plus a case of the wet food he needed to get through the worst was just over $650. I was in shock, but just glad my cat would be okay, so put $150 on my debit and just over $500 on the card.

When he still wasn't eating after another two days, she wrote a prescription for an appetite simulant administered on the skin of the inside part of his ear -- he hated it, but better than pilling a cat. That was another $35 that I had to put on the card, but it FINALLY got him to eat.

My aunt was able to give me $100 to help, and I was able to scrape together another $50 to pay towards this, but that's still $385 that I really need to get paid off before my car insurance company pulls my credit again.

I am SO glad my cat is better, even if he has now graduated to dry c/d and it's $55 a month (cheaper than the wet, even if that's $35 more a month than I'm used to paying). I was so scared for my furbaby through the whole thing I barely held myself together. And I know I am VERY lucky to even have an emergency credit card (even if its interest rate is 30%).

It's just not fair that car insurance rates get jacked just because your credit score changes, even if you've not had any accidents or missed any payments to THEM.

Thanks for letting me vent.

[Karadeniz]

1. Is kitty a longhair? I had a longhair who stopped eating....for days! A blood test showed his liver

values were 12 times normal. But, the liver is affected by starvation, so I put him in a cage and syringe fed him his food as a gruel. This went on for maybe a week. One day I noticed some wet fur on the floor outside his cage and decided he might have vomited it up. Hmmm... was he not eating because he was full of fur? I continued the syringe feeding and he finally had enough to make a poop. Some fur in it, so his stomach was full of fur in addition to its usual place in the esophagus. That never happens! I continued his gruel, even after he was eating on his own. It took about two weeks until I was satisfied the fur was out of his stomach, but he got well and lived for many years! Keep kitty well flushed!

[moriah]

5. He is, but when he had his vomiting fit...

.... he got down to bile at the end. When they examined him, no abdominal tenderness, but they did an x-ray anyway just to rule out a blockage. His liver enzymes were still okay, which is why the doc didn't start force-feeding.

The vet said they thought it was mild pancreatitis brought on by a UTI, and UTIs are often silent. The treatment for pancreatitis is exactly what we would have done as the next step anyway, and the test for it isn't on routine blood panels so it would have been wasting money when the treatment was the same -- get the cat to eat!

Fortunately he is eating now without the medication. He did NOT like me gloving up to mess with his ears.

I'm just now trying to cope with the monetary side of the cat emergency and not panic and rail at the universe for being unfair.

[Karadeniz]

8. Good luck!!! I've been so fortunate in finding vets, when we lived in a big city, who slashed their

prices for my fosters. Now we're in a small town and prices are way lower!

[drmeow]

3. Consumer reports

is lobbying to make that illegal (using credit scores to determine car insurance rates) - you might consider sharing your story with them.

[moriah]

7. I will -- I'm SO upset, and yet so grateful my baby is here and I could get him treated.

Thank you all for listening... I'm on disability, so it's REALLY hard when my routine bills go up.

[Phoenix61]

4. The things we do for our furbabies, right?

So happy yours is feeling better. Congratulations on working on your credit rating. Have you pulled credit reports recently? You can get a free one every year from each of the 3 major credit bureaus. I had a defaulted power bill from California on mine. I’ve never even lived in California so I got that removed. My credit score got trashed many years ago when my husband passed. Pain in the butt to fix but well worth it. I couldn’t agree more about keeping poor people poor. It seems odd that your credit score would change that much based on one card. The following article may be helpful to you. https://www.thebalance.com/how-having-a-zero-balance-affects-your-credit-score-960530

[moriah]

6. It's utilization changes.

When I just use it to pay for gas and then pay it off, it shows about a $35 balance each month -- well below the $750 limit.

Now it's sitting at over 50% utilization. 10% is ideal, 30% is when it stops hitting credit AS hard.