I have to write about what is happening to me.
I’m $110,000 in debt, and I’m not even 30 years old. Seven years ago, I had no debt at all. Today, I have six figures’ worth, and no way of paying it off in sight.
You may ask, “How did this happen?”
This is a question I have asked myself many times. How did I end up so far in debt, with a bad stomach, a strained marriage, and a poverty mentality that could bankrupt Donald Trump? How did I get to the point where I’m completely backed into a corner, and I’m not even 30?
The answer is deceptively simple. All of this happened because I am a credit card addict. In psychotherapy and addiction recovery parlance, you’d say I am a “compulsive debtor.”
Like millions of my fellow Americans, I suffer from the disease and addiction of credit card debting. Unfortunately, I am not alone. Consider the following:
- Almost half of American families spend more than they earn each year.[i]
- In 2005, Americans spent a total of $39 billion more than they earned.[ii]
- 60% of Americans have been in debt for more than a year.[iii]
- The average U.S. household owes $9,659 on credit cards.[iv]
- Personal bankruptcies have doubled in the past decade.[v]
- According to the latest statistics from the Federal Reserve, American consumers owed a grand total of $1.9773 trillion in October 2003, including credit cards, car payments, and other forms of debt not including mortgages. That’s about $18,654 per household, a number that is up more than 41% from what consumers owed just five years earlier.[vi]
There is no question we are in the midst of a debting epidemic, and I could be its poster boy. Fed by my insecurity and the need to look good, and encouraged by our consumer culture, debting has taken over my life. Fueled by grandiosity, impatience, and impulsivity, this addiction has brought me to the brink of self-destruction. Nobody talks about it, but credit card addiction is breaking families apart, harming peoples’ health, and creating incredible stress and personal chaos all over the country. When you consider that “the average American household spends 14% of its disposable income paying off debt, (and) puts negative 0.5% into savings,”[vii] it’s easy to understand why.
Take my own case. I’m broke, I’m depressed, and I’m on the brink of bankruptcy. I have stomach problems that are so serious I recently was in the emergency room twice in the span of two days. There are times I really don’t want to go on any more. If I didn’t have a wife and son, I’d seriously contemplate suicide as a way out. It’s that bad.
Fortunately, I have them relying on me, and that keeps me here. But I have created stress and problems for myself and family which are indescribable, and the pain I am in on a daily basis is almost unbearable. All because of my debting.
Debting, for our purposes, could be broadly defined as borrowing unsecured money with no collateral (such as a house or car) to secure the loan, with no plan of how you’re going to pay it back. Like alcoholism, many consider debting to be a disease. It takes over your mind, becoming an obsession.
You borrow on one credit card to pay off another. You buy yourself things on credit to manage the anxiety created by how much debt you have. You bump your monthly payments up higher and higher with each new purchase, figuring that you’re so far gone, you might as well charge just one more thing. You may figure that, with how much you owe, it doesn’t really matter if your minimum payments go up; you’re never going to be able to pay off all your debt, anyway. You become crippled, emotionally, financially, and spiritually.
In a way, debting can become like gambling.[viii] You think if you can come up with “one big score,” you’ll be able to pay off all your debt. As soon as you get that promotion; as soon as you get that big inheritance; as soon as business picks up; as soon as you hit that big jackpot; as soon as your parents, or your children, or your spouse comes along to save the day and bail you out, you’ll be fine. But you never get the score; the promotion doesn’t help; and the bailouts, after a while, run dry. Nothing external, outside of you, will fix the problem. The disease is eating away at you, from the inside, and the only way to change it is from the inside. No one is going to do it for you.
I myself was unaffected by the disease of debting until the age of 22. It may have been lying dormant; in fact, during high school and college, I was militant in my conviction that I be debt-free. I had already seen the stress and chaos caused by the debting of family members, and I wasn’t about to let that happen to me.
But eventually the disease got me, and little by little, it took over my life. When I was debting, I had to have everything I wanted, and I had to have it right away. This impatience is the curse of the debtor. We’re terrible at delaying gratification, and that “gotta have it now” feeling gets us in a lot of trouble. We end up ruining health, relationships, and our own self-respect, not to mention our credit scores and financial futures, because we can’t stop debting. Like a drug addict looking for a hit, we can’t stop spending; money is the drug, and when we run out, we debt in order to keep going.
For me, the debting problem started in graduate school. I wanted to study psychology, and there was a program I was interested in at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. It was an expensive program, but I convinced myself I had to do this program at Naropa. No other program would do.
So, impulsively I did it, never mind that it left me with almost $60,000 in school loans. As the disease took over my mind, I thought, “Damn the torpedoes. I’ll make plenty of money after grad school. Therapists make tons of money. Besides, it’s not the same as credit card debt. It’s for my education. I’m not really debting.”
And that’s where the thinking errors started. Thinking errors, most of them unconscious, are the fuel that feeds addiction. They are the beliefs and rationalizations that drive us deeper and deeper down the hole of our addictions. For example, an alcoholic thinks he can have just one drink; the compulsive overeater thinks she can have just one piece of cake; and the debtor thinks he can debt, so long as it’s “for school,” or, “for the business.” My first thinking error was, “It has to be Naropa, and it’s okay to debt to make it happen.”
Could I have found another program, perhaps one that would have given me a scholarship? Sure. I got through college on scholarships. I’m a smart guy, and I’m generally good at convincing people to invest in me. I could have gotten a fellowship, or been a T.A. somewhere, or even gotten research grant. There would have been many ways to study graduate psychology at a more traditional school. In short, I could have gotten my master’s degree for much less money than I spent at Naropa.
So why didn’t I do that? Why did I shoot myself in the foot, and take on all this educational debt? I honestly don’t know. The affliction snuck in, knocked me on my keister, and didn’t let go until about a year ago. For the seven years in between, I was an active debtor. It started with school loans, but I ended up borrowing money on credit cards, borrowing from friends and family, and even signing long leases that I couldn’t get out of, just so I could feel like a big shot. Once I started debting, I couldn’t stop. It didn’t happen all at once, but it wasn’t long before this “cunning, baffling, and powerful”[ix] illness had a hold of me.
After school, I thought I needed to debt in order to start a private counseling practice. Slowly, the debt load accumulated, and I became more and more disorganized and unwell in my thinking. I started out by charging office furniture and business lunches with potential referral sources, but eventually I ended up debting daily on whatever I wanted, whether I could afford it or not, and whether the expense was business-related, or not.
And now, the chickens have come home to roost. I’m deep in debt, and the bills are crushing me each month. My marriage is in rough shape, my health is poor, and my emotions are running rampant. I’m under so much pressure that I have a hard time falling asleep at night, and then I have a hard time getting up in the morning. I have to do something about it.
So, I’ve decided to write. For now, I’m just writing for me. I’m writing to relieve my own stress, since there are so few people I can talk to about this. A very challenging aspect of being a debtor is that there are no more taboo subjects in our culture than money and debt. Very few people want to talk about it, and I need to talk about it. So, rather than embarrass myself by talking about it at work, or burden my friends and family with it, I’m going to talk about it here, and I hope it will help me sort through this difficult period.
I also hope the process of writing will in some way help my wife and infant son, who pick up on my stress. They deserve to have more of me than they get when I’m distracted and stressed about money and debt. If I can let out my concerns and anxieties here, I hope I can be more available to them.
So here’s my plan: I’m going to write, as much as I can. I’ll use the writing process as a confidant, with whom I can discuss our culture’s last taboos: money and debt. I’ll go to work each day, and take care of business, and try to be present with my family. And I’ll write here, as much as I can, as often as I can. My goal is to keep it up for one year, and see what comes out of it.
I hope the process of writing will help me to clarify my situation and resolve as much of my debt as I can. I hope writing will make me more available to my family. I hope something useful might eventually come of this writing that will help other debtors. And, most of all, I hope that writing here will help me not to accrue any new debt. That’s the most important thing I can hope for, because I know if I start debting again, my life as I know it will be over.
[i] Khan, Kim. How Does Your Debt Compare? Reported on msn.com. Web site address: http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/SavingandDebt/P70581.asp
[ii] Wall Street Journal, January 3, .
[iii] Gilson, James. “House of Cards.” Mother Jones, Sept-Oct. Perhaps the juiciest collection of statistics I encountered in my research for this book. You can pick up a hard copy of the magazine from Mother Jones online, or you can look up the article at the following web address: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1329/is_5_32/ai_n19492955
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Khan, op. cit.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Gilson, op. cit.
[viii] Indeed, many gamblers are also compulsive debtors, racking up credit card debt as a way to feed their gambling habits.
[ix] This is how the debting disease is described in the self-help program Debtors Anonymous.
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