Have you ever gone backwards in the hobby?

[zljones]

Have you ever hit a bad point in your collecting where you had to sell a good portion of your cards due to certain issues? Maybe have you ever had cards stolen or damaged?
I am asking because I recently am taking a huge, giant step backwards, I am forced to sell the majority of my collection due to a massive paycut at work, that was 20% of my salary, and also lost of student loan debt. The owner told me I was getting paid too much for the past 1 and 1/4, and they made a payroll error, which is true but I think he should honor his mistake since it has been over 1 year of this pay. I did not notice I was getting paid too much because my salary was part expense report and salary (confusing), but it was the only way he could afford to pay me a good amount. He set me ans others up this way so he could compensate for the fact that this company moved over 30 miles from our houses when it used to be 7 miles away. I never worked payroll, nor got paid this way so I trusted what they came up with. I felt there was maybe an error but when I asked over a year ago they said I was getting paid what I was supposed to be paid and it was not too much. So I took their word for it. Now they finally discovered the error all this time later. I need to sell most of my babies off to keep my head above water. I now have listings up on Ebay and it sucks.
Maybe if I hear other stories I won't feel too crushed and it could show hope that maybe I can return to the hobby one day soon after I get a new job. Right now I feel discouraged at the thought of rebuilding all my subsets back up in the future. It sucks to sell cards that I just bought a few weeks ago too right before I got notice they were slicing my pay to an unreasonable amount.