By now, you’re probably wondering: how did he rack up all this debt, in the first place?
Well, I mentioned that it started with my graduate school loans. After I graduated, I wanted to start a private practice. However, I was reticent to borrow any more money to do it. Both my parents, and several other relatives, had money problems when I was growing up, and I had learned from observation that debting was generally not a good idea.
So, for the first 22 years of my life, I didn’t do it. Even in college, when many of my friends were racking up credit card balances, I abstained. In this way, I was very much in the minority; according to U.S. News and World Report, “the average undergraduate today owes some $2,100 spread out over more than four credit cards.”[i] But throughout my college years, I held out. I didn’t want to get caught in the same trap so many of my family members had fallen into. In fact, even up to the age of 25, when I graduated from Naropa, I still had never used a credit card.
Enter the misguided business coach, the man who led me to the dark side of debt. This was a person with whom I had engaged in psychotherapy during graduate school, someone who knew me well. We’ll call him Andrew (his name, like the others in this blog, has been changed).
Like a lamb led to the slaughter, I at first reluctantly, and then enthusiastically, agreed to be Andrew’s protégé. He was successful, and had a busy and thriving practice. He had helped me in therapy, and he seemed to know what he was doing as a business coach. I had every reason to trust him. Or so I thought.
What still infuriates me as I write this today is that Andrew knew my family had financial issues. He knew why I was so adverse to credit cards. He knew how much sway he had over me. He also knew that he himself had gone bankrupt due to overspending on credit cards when he was first setting up his practice (you’d think that from this, he would have learned to be careful with debt, and not encourage others to debt irresponsibly, but apparently not).
Did any of this stop him from encouraging me to debt, from applying relentless pressure to just “bite the bullet, borrow $10,000, and start my practice” (a direct quote)? No, none of this stopped Andrew, because he was so self-absorbed that he thought he could play God. He thought that, if he could get me to throw caution to the wind, I would be able to debt without consequence, and become the therapy king of Boulder, Colorado, where I was living at the time. In his mind, I’m sure he would have then taken all the credit as my erstwhile business coach, who finally torpedoed my fear, denial, and hesitation, got me to take the plunge, and finally embrace debt as a way of life.
I know I have some responsibility here. No one held a gun to my head and made me start using credit cards. But, between the relentless advertising of the credit card industry, and Andrew’s insistence that using them was the only way to get my business going, I was seduced. I take full responsibility for my actions; I know I am to blame for the mess I am in now. However, I do feel Andrew acted unethically, and I’m still angry with him for pressuring me to debt, and angry with myself for giving in to the pressure.
Needless to say, over time, I finally knuckled under. I started to debt, “for the business.” By the time I got wise to Andrew, after he’d been coaching me for a little over a year, it was too late.
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