BOkay.net

About Me

Hello,

I  decided to create BOkay.net because I wanted to do a formal documentation of the different things I’m doing in my life and with my time, and to give an explanation as to why I’m doing them.

I’m usually stuck with a lot on my plate because of fate, because of my own personal goals, because I’m always aiming high and thinking big, and sometimes because that’s just the way I like things.

Every day I have to try to create an organized chaos out of the chaos that is my life. I create lists, documents, plans, bookmarks, favorites, notes, pictures, mental notes, and all other kinds of things to stay organized, to make plans, to remember things, to archive things, to save things for when I’ll need them, and plenty of other reasons.

In addition to trying to keep everything organized I’m also trying to teach myself some web development skills. And that is where the idea to create this blog came from. Through this blog I will be documenting and organizing my life as well as teaching myself the skills needed for web development.

To understand everything I will be going over in this blog you will first need some background information on myself.

My name is Bora Okay and in December of 2005 I graduated from Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. I double majored in Business Management and Computer Information Systems and also minored in Philosophy & Religion. As of this writing I’ve been working for Automatic Data Processing for almost 4 years as a Technical Analyst in Charlotte, North Carolina

I decided to live with my parents after graduating from ASU to help out as much I could. While in my last year of college my parents fell into financial trouble. I helped out as much as I could while in college, so once I graduated the obvious choice for me was to move back in with them so I could help straighten out their finances.

My parents are a lot older than most parents are for someone my age. When I graduated from ASU I was 23 years old and my mom was 63 and working fulltime and my dad was 73 and retired.

The best way for me to go over the situation we were in the first two or three years after I was out of college is just for me to list everything out.

• Parents were behind on the mortgage and getting closer to foreclosure.
• Behind on the utility bills and getting closer to having any one of the electricity, gas, or water utilities cut off.
• Behind on two car loans and was in danger of getting them repossessed.
• Lease ended on my car and we could not finance it because of our poor credit, so the car was picked up and returned. (I loved that car)
• In MASSIVE credit card dept and unable to make payments towards them.
• Dad lost his life insurance and the money he put toward it over the years because of non-payment and at the age of 73 that wasn’t a good thing.
• Mom never had any life insurance.
• A storm caused a branch to fall onto our roof and puncture it. This caused water to come in to our kitchen and den area whenever it rained. This ruined the ceiling and insulation and at the time we were financially unable to fix any of it.
• House Plumbing:
  • Our upstairs bathroom’s piping literally crumbled to dust from rust.
  • Our water heater burst leaving us without hot water.
  • The water pressure coming out of our faucets throughout most of the house could best be described as “tickling out” because of rust inside the galvanized pipes and it was only a matter of time before they crumbled to dust like the upstairs bathroom’s pipes had.
• The car I was using after my original car was returned had its engine blow up and was not repairable.
• My mom suffers from depression and anxiety and the stress of all our problems and constant collection phone calls was causing her to lash out constantly and make everyone miserable including myself and we were not getting along at all throughout most of this.
• My dad was eventually diagnosed with a mix of several mental illnesses. All these illnesses are just prescribed conditions and can’t be clinically tested for, so it is believed he as a mix of Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer, and worst of all Shy-Dragger Syndrome/Multiple System Atrophy (MSA).

There is probably more but this is all I could think of off the top of my head and I don’t really feel like focusing on the bad.

While things looked bad at the time we were actually very lucky. For one, all this happened before the economic down turn we are in today. If it had happened at the same time that the economy went south then things would have been even more difficult.

But more importantly we are lucky we have great friends that were able to help us out at times when we were in a pinch financially. The Orkins who are close family friends and one of my best friends’ @LarryAnthony helped us out greatly.

Shortly after I graduated from ASU I was able to find a well paying job at ADP and I’m still at that job today. When our roof sprung a leak on us it actually helped us. Instead of fixing it, we covered our roof in a tarp and were able to use the insurance money to help make ends meet when we were out of money. (You can read more here)

With the income from my new job and help from our friends we managed to survive about a year before I came to the conclusion that there was no getting out from under my parents’ debt. It would have been impossible for them to get out of this debt in their life time. Therefore I decided they needed to file for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy.

My parents didn’t have the capability to do such a complicated task themselves so I did my homework on it all. After doing a lot of research on credit and bankruptcy law we were ready to file and knew what we were getting ourselves into before we pulled the trigger on such a big decision. We hired a bankruptcy lawyer to go to court with us and I filled out all the necessary paperwork as well as collected probably 10 years worth of financial documents. I went through a ton of their bills and paper work so that we could include every debt they owed. My dad had drawers upon drawers and boxes upon boxes of random unorganized documents. It took a VERY long time to go through them all. And while I was at it I made a filing system and organized everything important. I pulled their credit reports and found every account they had on file so that once the bankruptcy was over there wouldn’t be anyone who could fall through the cracks and continue to call us on the phone or send us letters demanding money.

Thankfully after I did the leg work and turned in our paperwork to the lawyer everything went smooth. We went to court, our bankruptcy was approved, we got to keep our cars and our home and we were finally out from under that impossible debt.

The year after that was all about getting us back on our feet. First thing we did was pay back our friends who helped us with interest. We then caught up on all our bills and become current on our mortgage and utilities. We were also able to pay off one car before the bankruptcy and the other one after.

We were able to save enough money to fix our roof. (You can read more here)

When our water heater broke we went without hot water for about a week because we needed to save money for a new one. Even after a week’s worth of saving we could only afford the water heater and not the cost of installation. When we had the money for the water heater I researched how to install it and installed it myself so we could afford it and finally have some hot water again.  (You can read more here)

When the pipes for our water lines started to go bad we sought estimates from plumbers to replace all our pipes. Their estimates were outrageous and there was no way we could afford that. But we still needed it fixed. I did my research on how to do the plumbing and re-plumbed our entire house with new piping called PEX that made installation easier and less expensive. We no longer had to worry about pipes bursting and our water pressure improved quite a bit. (You can read more here)

Though things were getting better we still had several bumps in the road.

About 2 or 3 years after we paid off the car I was using its engine blew up on me. We eventually just donated it to charity and used one car to get around. My mom would drop me off at work and go to her job. Then I’d wait on her to get off work and come pick me up at the end of the day.

Fortunately we improved our finances so much it wasn’t long before I was able to buy my mom a car she loves and I just took the one she was driving. It’s another monthly payment, but we could now afford it and we really needed to have two cars.

My mom eventually left her job working at a school for special needs children to nanny full time for a family with two little girls. The money was a lot better but it put us in a bind when it came to health insurance. With her leaving her job she also had to leave behind the employer’s health insurance plan she had for herself and my dad. Luckily my dad was on Medicare but my mom was not old enough for Medicare yet. We ended up taking a gamble and luckily nothing serious happened while my mom was uninsured because we decided to just wait till she was old enough to enroll her in Medicare.

Now my dad has supplemental health insurance to take care of the expenses that Medicare doesn’t cover and I have also enrolled him with some basic life insurance.  Mom is now on Medicare and also has dental insurance. This year I plan to get her some supplemental health insurance and a life insurance plan as well.

The ridiculous amount of stress my mom was under is now gone and she is doing much better. We get along a lot better and she is nowhere as depressed as she used to be.

My dad’s disease has slowly been progressing. The key word here is “slowly”. We are lucky that he has a slow progression and is not getting worse every day like some with the disease do. We have him on some new medications that seem to be helping a little and he recently came back with positive results after a scan of his brain. He didn’t have any serious lacerations or shrinkage of his brain so he should be OK for the most part for now.

Though all this was stressful and hard we were very lucky and I was very fortunate to have learned so much. I’ve received life lessons in personal finance, consumer credit law, bankruptcy law, Social Security, Medicare, health and supplemental health insurances, life insurance policies, plumbing, construction and much more.

And this pretty much sums up the past 5 years of my life.

Things are going well now and I plan on finally concentrating a little more on myself.

I’ve developed a interest in remodeling and design and am now remodeling our entire home. I decided to do a remodel not only because it needs it but because I enjoy it and plan on owning this house for myself soon. (You can read more here)

I’m also concentrating on my career and education.   I’ve already gotten three IT certificates in my spare time:

CompTIA A+
CompTIA Network+
CompTIA Security+

I plan on attending UNCC and getting my Graduate Certificate in Information Security and Privacy.   I then plan on applying to a top business school to obtain my MBA.

(You can read more about my career goals here)

I also created a sister site to this one on my plan to attain an MBA from a top university. I figured that goal of mine will take on a life of its own so I am dedicating a site just to my pursuit of an MBA degree. You can find that site at:

http://www.embeeaye.com

The rest I plan to blog about as I go. Hope you find it interesting.