A Creditable Cautionary Tale

I got my first credit card when I was 18. It was a “Coop” card, for the “bookstore” Harvard and MIT each had branches of. This was a bookstore in the same sense that Wal-Mart is. Books were a minor offering. There were clothes, toiletries, games, bedding, jewelry… I took advantage of all of it. As a result, there has not been one debt-free moment in my entire adult life. I am 45 now, almost 46.

It’s not that I didn’t know the value of money. Even in high school I knew enough to steal the change from the jar in my parents’ closet so I could buy cigarettes and vanilla frosting. I even knew how to work for money. From age 11, my parents paid me for cooking meals and doing laundry. If I cooked, I got 50 cents. Cleaning up afterward would double that. I seem to recall laundry netting a dollar, but that may have been for more than one load. I even got money for “babysitting” myself. When I began babysitting for other kids, I started accumulating real riches. Or I would have, except that I always found something to spend those riches on – usually something ephemeral like candy.

Addiction can certainly eat away at a budget, and even though candy, frosting, and cigarettes are cheaper than cocaine (and back then cigarettes were much cheaper), when your appetite for them is bottomless, you can still spend all you have and then find yourself stealing to get more.

Of course, spending money, too, is an addiction, even more so when it’s done on a plastic card that just goes back in your pocket after the transaction, as if nothing has happened. I discovered this early on in life. Sure, the bill would come each month, but for each $100 I had spent, I would only have to pay $5-10 in minimum payment. What a deal!

I graduated college at age 20 with both credit card and student loan debt of more than $25,000. I am not sure if I have yet paid that off, even though the banks and loan agencies say I did. I did so many convoluted transactions with that money that credit default swaps actually seem tame in comparison. I consolidated loans. I put them on forbearance so I could travel or work for minimum wage. I took out new credit cards with “Zero Percent Interest When You Transfer a Balance!” I went to graduate school and added $18,000 more in student loans. At this point I don’t know how much more there was from credit cards, but I had to have my sushi dinners and nights out with friends, right? After all, I was living in New York City!

Later I got married and we bought a house (with a mortgage, of course). After a few years we refinanced and used the new equity to consolidate our old debts. Hey – no more student loans! No more credit cards! No more car loans! This would have been great except that I kept using the credit cards and we bought another new car with a loan. Luckily a home equity credit line came along just in time.

All of this sounds awful to me now. My chest is constricting as I write about how I* suffocated myself under these bricks of debt, but at the time I thought nothing of it. Here and there I’d have a few moments of panic or clarity where I’d realize how little freedom I had in my life because I had to pay these debts, but those moments would pass and the next time I wanted something, out would come the card.

Gradually over the last several years I have woken up from the free money dream. We cut up our cards so that even if we weren’t moving forward we could at least stop moving backward. But the biggest wake-up came a few years ago when we inherited some money. Suddenly here was a finite sum – not quite enough to pay everything off, but close. I wanted to pay off as much as possible, but it was scary because then that money would be gone and there would be no getting it back. I was afraid that then we wouldn’t have enough.

I know, the irony is obvious. When I had no money, I felt rich, but when we finally got some, I felt poor. I guess when something doesn’t seem real to you, the concept of having “enough” of it doesn’t even make sense. Do I have enough fairy dust in my life? Enough clouds made of marshmallow?

Now money isn’t fairy dust to me anymore, and I’ve cut up and thrown away my magic wands. Suddenly the world is like that scene in the Wizard of Oz when the curtain is pulled back to reveal that there was no magic, only fakery. In the movie, the characters discovered that they didn’t need the wizard’s magic because they had had what they needed all along. Is that true for me as well? Can I go back to Kansas under my own power and turn my castle in the air into a solid home on the ground, on a real foundation? I’ll keep you posted.

*Even though I am married, I can’t implicate my husband in any of this. He had gone merrily throughout his life without ever having a credit card when he met me. I was the vile temptress who led him down the road to perdition.