Friday will tell once I get paid but I think I'm finally fucking free of this miserable years-long cycle I've been caught in. All thanks to this subreddit, for real! From around the time COVID began and bills became an even bigger struggle than a usual to pay (while still needing to work an in-person job as an "essential worker"), I've been stuck in the worst cycle of borrowing against my paycheck in order to barely scrape by with rent and bills. It's been absolutely horrific and I've been deep in it with probably close to 20 of these stupid, predatory apps. Obviously I knew I was being stupid continuing to borrow, but I just could not break the cycle when I was running on literal fumes in my bank account week to week for years.
Then I stumbled across this sub last Thursday when I got home from work, and saw that people were revoking ACH access. I think I cried both maybe in a little bit of rage and relief because I had no goddamn idea you could do that and wish I knew sooner, and because I finally found a solution. I work a much different job now and get paid better than I ever have but it's still been so hard for me to just get by and I've been paying rent late with my landlord breathing down my neck and scrambling to pay bills and buy groceries and it's been bad.
Now for the first time in years I think I might actually get to see the bulk of my paycheck stay in my bank account for more than two minutes. I still am waiting on a response from a few apps, and I think there are a few "past due" ones where I will probably have to pay due to them being past the date where they would have initially pulled their advance back, and revoke access and delete them after that, but I got responses from the two biggest apps (EarnIn and Brigit) that were swallowing most of my paycheck whole plus a half dozen others.
So I guess we'll see on Friday but I have not felt so hopeful or relieved in literal years. Thanks everyone who's led the way with this... god, I wish I'd known sooner is all I can say.