A life-saving transaction
John and Belinda on their wedding day in August 2008. (Photo supplied by John Barrie)
Endless bills, bank calls and burden: battling debt is difficult, but imagine fighting cancer as well. Meet John and Belinda Barrie who overcame both – with some help from The Salvation Army’s Moneycare.
When John Barrie was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, his and his wife Belinda’s world was thrown into turmoil.
“At the time, there were eight known cases in the world, and mine was the only one in the southern hemisphere,” says John.
“What complicated matters even more was that two weeks earlier I’d left my long-time job and was in the middle of a bit of a career change.
“All of a sudden I got diagnosed with cancer and I had no job to fall back on – no income.”
Belinda gave up her blossoming driving school business to become John’s full-time carer as he went through over 10 months of chemotherapy and two bone marrow transplants.
Without John’s income and Belinda’s business, the couple found themselves sinking into more and more debt, struggling to repay mortgage and accumulating credit card bills.
“We were just so far behind [on the mortgage] … we ended up in such a terrible state,” says Belinda.
“They told us straight up that basically we’d be looking at around three to five years of John not being able to work, with the treatments and then the recovery for the treatments being quite harsh,” she says.
Belinda and John say their banks were unsympathetic to their situation, contacting them almost daily with phone calls demanding payment of their debts.
When John underwent surgery for a transplant with an 11 per cent chance of survival, Belinda, under pressure from the bank, was at an auction trying to sell their home.
“At that time it was just all confusing to me,” says Belinda. “I’d be sitting in a hospital room, he’d [John] be really sick and I’d be receiving calls from the bank wanting to know why we hadn’t paid this month’s credit card,” she says.
“Every time I tried to negotiate or work something out, nothing happened. It was just like hitting a wall of concrete.”
After unsuccessfully seeking help from other financial services, two years into John’s cancer treatment Belinda met George Nathan, a financial counsellor with The Salvation Army’s Moneycare Financial Counselling Service.
“That was the day my life took a major turn for the better,” says Belinda.
George liaised with the banks on behalf of John and Belinda and organised a payment plan to help the couple work their way out of debt.
“He took so much pressure off us, and off me in particular,” says Belinda. “I’d been under fairly constant pressure from day one when John first got sick.”
John says he noticed a huge difference in his wife after receiving help from Moneycare.
“The burden that I used to see in my wife’s face every month …it’s gone,” he says.
“So much stress that’s no longer there.”
Last October marked two years since John’s transplant surgery.
“So far all tests have come back cancer-free which is fantastic, the two-year ones are a great thing to be aiming for, so we’re pretty stoked to be where we are!” says Belinda.
While John still requires Belinda’s care, his cancer left him with a weakened immune system and the bone marrow of a 70 -year-old. But the couple are moving forward with a growing home business.
“If it wasn’t for Moneycare I don’t know that we would have been able to (have) reached the place that we’re at now,” says John.
Sarah Laing
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