I am still reeling from the message from my financial counselor. I started scouring over all of my school paperwork...all of that stuff I had to read and sign when signing up for classes three years ago. I clearly recall conversations with my transition counselor...the one who transitioned me from my associate-degree program into my bachelor-degree program...about out-of-pocket expenses. She did not explain anything about this 4th and 8th class out-of-pocket hit to me. If she had, I would have reminded her that anything of the kind was not possible. Our budget simply does not have the funds. With enough advanced warning, I could scrape it together (and I would have scraped it together), but my family just cannot come up with that kind of money in such short notice. With all of the financial headaches we went through in the past five years, we have no resources. I almost did not go back to school because of our lack of funds. At my age, I never expected to qualify for financial aid of any kind and with my credit in the toilet (refer please to previous comment about financial headaches over the past half-decade), I seriously doubted any loan company would take a risk on a nearly-fifty-year-old college student.

What am I going to do? I have to wait until tomorrow at least to get a response from my financial counselor--after all, today IS Sunday. I still think it was chicken-sh** of him to wait so long to inform me and then do it on a Saturday giving me absolutely zero time to even make an attempt to come up with the cash. It kills me that in one breath someone says, "Oh, you owe $804," and in the next breath they say, "you can put it on a credit card."

Yeah. If I had a credit card (refer to previous statement about...you get the picture).

Grr.