Ask HN: What Do I Do if a Client Refuses to Pay?

I contract for a company that took on a client project that has ended up severely over-budget and over-schedule. The short version of events is that the timeline was quoted assuming 3 developers, but one left a few days in and the other lied on her resume and sucked at everything, including straight content entry - leaving just me to do all the work in a timeline meant for 3 devs. No one else was hired until the past 2 weeks.

Understandably, the client has not paid the company I work for since the start of the project. Meanwhile I've been averaging 80 hour weeks trying to get things done in a rush. I took no holidays, a single sick day, and have completely lost my entire summer to this project.

When it was clear we weren't going to make the second deadline, I started capping my invoices at 40 hours per week instead of the actual time I was working on the project so as not to bleed the company. Soon after that, they began skipping pay days (for me only), or only paying partial amounts.

The company now owes me more than $10,000, my wife is rightly on my case about the whole thing, and they don't seem ready or willing to pay any of the outstanding amount.

Two new people have been hired in the past 2 weeks to help finish this project and handle other work that I literally haven't had time to do on this schedule. One of those people has both tech and management experience and has truly helped me fix the final parts of the project into an actionable plan that the three of us can complete quickly.

I've met with my manager and owner of the company on three separate occasions and I've always come out feeling like they listened and the financial situation would be taken care of. Each time I find myself grabbing my own ankles on pay day again.

So I ask HN - what would you do? I need to fix things, preferably without losing that money (we're broke now).