They Call Me Junebug

Debt Free Is the Way to Be

When I moved out of my parent’s house for the first time, I was 19 years old. I moved into a one bedroom apartment that I shared with a girl I met working at a Mexican food hole in the wall. We had actually gone to high school together, but with her being editor of the newspaper and year book and my status as a jock our social circles were sufficiently far apart that we had never even laid eyes on each other.

My dad bought me a twin mattress, and that was about all the help I got when I moved out. Not that I should have been given more help, on the contrary, I should have never been allowed to move out. But, I was and I did and so we moved our two little twin beds into that one bedroom, she got a cat, and I bought an Apex DVD player for $90 off eBay (that very same DVD player is in our bedroom right now, and continues to work like a champ).

I lived in that apartment from October 2001 to May 2002, and in that time I managed to wrack up something like $4500 in credit card debt. It’s easy to do, when you bring home about $16,000 a year, out of the $21,000 on your pay stub. Sure, I was a 19 year old girl and I bought some frivolous stuff, like the Halloween decorations for the one and only Halloween party I’ve ever thrown, or the Dallas Stars tickets I bought my then boyfriend for Christmas. But sadly, most of that debt was day to day living, those little pieces of plastic allowed me to eat, to put gas in my car, to make the 5 hour trips to see my boyfriend at college(which seemed like a must at the time), to help bail him out of financial difficulties, and to sometimes cover my rent.

When the boyfriend and I decided that we wanted to get married, and the roommate took a turn for psychotic, I moved back home to save money for the impending nuptials. I shared a double bed with my then 8 year old sister, and let me tell you, those were some of the best nights of sleep I ever had. She was a great sleeping partner, she’d burrow up next to me, and I can’t even begin to express how soundly I slept with her silent emotional support. That’s when I think I began to understand the healing power of human touch in my life.

Over the next 9 months, I saved money, got engaged, planned a big fancy wedding, got $5000 from my parents to help pay for the wedding, used that money to pay off all of my credit cards, and of course started wracking the charges back up. When I finally called off the wedding, the day after New Years, 2003, just a mere 2 months before the wedding, I was back to being about $3000 in debt.

I moved out of my parents house for what has proved to be the last time (so far!) in March 2003, 11 days after I was supposed to have been married. (Funny side note, but the day I was to be married, I was actually riding the Staten Island Ferry with my best friend and her flask of rum, drunk off my ass and watching an interesting exchange between a stock broker from Long Island and two trannies.) From March to December, I went through a really rough time, and when I finally regained consciousness, I owed a staggering $11,000 in credit card and private (i.e. cable, cell phone etc) debt.

The fact that a 22 year old with a job making just $27,500 a year can be allowed to accumulate that much credit in the first place should be criminal. However, it’s not, and I did it, and I was drowning and couldn’t see how I would ever pay that back. I couldn’t keep up with the minimum payments, the overdue fees were killing me, and it was sending me back to a place I had worked very hard to get away from, and neither I nor my family could handle another couple of months like the few from April – November.

One day at work while googling how to declare bankruptcy (at 21 years old), I stumbled across a program offering debt counseling. I signed right up, and by the grace of God I blindly selected one of the few reputable counseling companies that didn’t rip me off. That day, during the lunch hour at my increasingly miserable job, I stared my debt in the face for the first time. I had never before added it all up; I had never assessed the damage. To that point I had patently ignored and pointedly refused to face how much money I owed. I was shocked. I was sick. And I felt hopeless.

January 15, 2004 I made my first payment of a measly $254 towards my debt, and with the lower interest rates the counseling agency negotiated for me, it would have taken me a mere 3 and a half years to pay it all off. At 21, 3 and half years seemed an eternity. Especially since part of the counseling program was that all of my credit cards were turned off and I couldn’t establish any new lines of credit until the old debts were paid off.

The next 2 and a half years of living strictly off of what I brought home from work were some of the hardest times of my life. I changed jobs twice, both times trading up for a bigger paycheck, something that a person in my predicament could not turn down. I graduated from $254 a month to a $366 monthly payment. If those credit cards had not been turned off by the issuing companies, there were hundreds of times that I would have used any one of them, to buy things like toilet paper, or ramen noodles or to have my car inspected.

There were weeks that all I had to eat were the meals my mother offered me (which would have been many more, had she known my dire financial situation), and whatever I could scrounge from the break room at work. During most of this time I was lucky enough to work for a company that kept their kitchen stocked weekly with fresh fruit and animal crackers. I can’t tell you how much I came to both loathe and appreciate the site of bananas and animal crackers. I’d eaten them enough meals to be thoroughly disgusted with them, but if I was hungry, they’d never looked so good. Some days vendors would bring in extra goodies, breakfast burritos or cookies, and those were my favorite days. Most weeks I managed to supplement my animal crackers & bananas with ramen noodles and oatmeal, I could purchase a weeks supply of both for $1.95 including tax at the local Wal Mart.

The scary thing was that no one I knew realized what was going on. Thanks to hand me downs and my mother, I managed quite a few new (to me) outfits to fit my rapidly slimming body, and because of my sacrifices elsewhere, I managed to keep my truck and my apartment and my utilities on, most of the time. But to look at me, no one would have ever guessed that I was having trouble making ends meet. Sure, I didn’t go out to eat very often, or if I did I drank water and had a side salad (which did work nicely into my diet, as I had about 35 pounds to lose), but they thought I was just being health conscious.

Gradually, my situation got a little better, and then a few months later it would again get a little better. By the spring of 2005 I was doing well enough that I could move to a slightly larger apartment and I didn’t have to worry about my electricity being cut off, but my budget was still on the precariously lean side. I went an entire year without getting my truck registered because I never could bring myself to part with the $68 it called for; there were always groceries or gas to be bought.

Things started looking up, and I slowly began to pay a little extra each month as I had it towards my debts. I can’t tell you how proud I felt when I paid off one of the smallest credit cards. I felt like I could do anything, and I felt like all of those hard times had finally meant something. The end was in site, I scrimped even more and it became a contest against my bank account, just how much could I pay off this month and still survive?

April 7th, 2006, one month before I got married, I used my entire bonus from my job to pay off the last remaining debts. I cried as I spoke to the nice counselor who scheduled the last payment I would ever have to make. I felt as if I was finally shedding all of the guilt, pain and failure that I had been living with for the past 4 years. Those were the hardest years of my life, physically, emotionally, financially and professionally. And I had survived. I was still alive with most of my mental capabilities intact, and my money was my own. At least until I got married anyway!

Before this year, if anyone ever asked me what I was proud of, I never had an answer for them. Now I do.

posted by The Call Me Junebug @ 1:39 PM