Recently I received some btc that took about 4 days, there is another transfer that was made May 7th, I have not gotten it yet!
How can I find out the status / when I will receive it??!? I was told that the "slowdown" is due to
higher transfer fees. Will these fees ever lower, and are BTC worth the investment still??!? (Layman Terms Please).
Since May 7th! Are you sure the sender actually did the transaction as claimed? Some people can be funny sometimes. To be sure demand for the transaction ID and then head to mempool to check for the transaction.
It is also possible that the transaction was dropped so the sender needs to rebroadcast the transaction. So if @OP check the transaction ID and turned invalid, it is possible that the transaction was dropped. He should ask the sender to rebroadcast the transaction with a higher fee making miners include the transaction on their mined block.
Early this year I made a transaction that wasn't received for over 48hrs due to how very low the fee was and based on persistent disturbance from the receiver I had to resend same transaction but this time with a higher fee. So OP you should insist on the sender to resend it again with a better fee rate.
You can also make use of this post for easier support. All about "stuck" transactions and what you can do to fix them
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.17954548Low fees tend to be dropped and ignored by miners, so @OP could have the same case, and indeed he needs to pester the sender to rebroadcast the transaction so that he can receive the sent coins.
In some wallets you can just reset it and it will return to you
You can't "just reset" your wallet and your funds would return to you, you can't cancel a BTC transaction once it has been made, though for the period it is unconfirmed you can 'cancel' it by double spending the input you want to send, creating a new transaction with the same input and higher fees, with your own address as the recipient.
In this case OP is the receiver, so they can only use CPFP to hasten the transaction confirmation, or submit the transaction ID to transaction accelerators like ViaBTC, and hope the mining pool adds their transaction in the next blocks they are going to mine.
True, we can not just reset our wallet to make the fund return to us unless we double spend it before the transaction is dropped, and if the transaction is dropped, the sender cannot use the sent Bitcoin while the receiver cannot receive them since the bitcoin sent is considered not valid. The sender can use RBF and the receiver can use CPFP with a higher fee to rebroadcast the transaction and get confirmed.