Debtors Search for Discipline via Blogs by John Leland
The New York Times, February 18, 2007
When a woman who calls herself Tricia discovered last week that she owed $22,302 on her credit cards, she could not wait to spread the news. Tricia, 29, does not talk to her family or friends about her finances, and says she is ashamed of her personal debt.I have my share of debt. Mostly student loans, but I now also have about $800 in revolving debt (whittled down from almost $1000 a little over a month ago). In the short two months I've had my own lines of credit, it has both saved my life and significantly diminished its quality. I think it is a brilliant idea to blog about it because debt is that dirty secret that many people carry, yet never seem to be able to share with the closest people in their lives. It's the pressure of that secrecy that perpetuates it more than any other single influence. I know it's hard for me, every single day, to explain why I have no life and why that's okay to my co-workers. One of them even jokes about how I'm poor, but I'm not sure he knows just how much or else he may not feel so comfortable joking about it. But I'm not calling this blog 'Go, Go Gadget Debtinator' for a reason (despite it being a very spiffy title). This isn't just about debt.
Yet from the laundry room of her home in northern Michigan, Tricia does something that would have been unthinkable — and impossible — a generation ago: she goes online and posts intimate details of her financial life, including her net worth (now negative $38,691), the balance and finance charges on her credit cards, and the amount of debt she has paid down since starting a blog about her debt last year ($15,312).
Her journal, bloggingawaydebt.com, is one of dozens that have sprung up in recent years taking advantage of Internet anonymity to reveal to strangers fiscal intimacies the authors might not tell their closest friends.
There are many reasons to be miserable in this world, and a lot of them are happening to me right now.
Many reasons, eh? And you're so miserable how? Where to start! Let's see... I live in a group house with a bunch of loud, dirty college students, and I hate being around college students. I work less than 3 miles from where I live, but there are big scary highways and cars zooming past on every road to the office, so it ranges from unpleasant to dangerous to ride my bike or run to work. Now that there's snow and ice everywhere, I ride a shuttle to work every day, but I have to walk for more than 10 minutes to catch the stop nearest my house and again from the stop nearest to the office. I don't get enough real exercise because I'm too achy and grumpy about this situation most of the time. I have no friends here except some nice people who work with me, but they aren't in debt like I am, nor are any of them half as poor as I am. They also all have their college degrees or are about to earn them in a few months time. I'm still waiting to hear from a school about if I even get to come and finally work on finishing my own.
Is that all? Of course not! My boyfriend is the only person who knew all of this about me until now, but he lives 900 miles away and we can't afford to see each other very often. We can't actually live in the same metropolitan area until late October, and even if the visits are spread out to every three months, neither of us can afford for the visits to last as long as a week. A few days is the most we can ask, and that sets us back an enormous amount every time we do it. I feel lonely and miserable almost every minute of the day, every day of the week. This is also due to the fact that I just relocated a few months ago and all of my friends and family are spread out over a handful of states from coast to coast. This sometimes makes me put undue pressure on my boyfriend, from whom just one hug or kiss would make me feel happy again, even for a few fleeting seconds. I am almost certain that when we finally see each other again, it will have been so long that we will seem alien to each other and nothing will feel real. It may take all the days of our visit for us to feel normal again, and then it will be time to separate, and everything that seems so gray to me now will go black and empty.
Wow, what a downer you are. But you know, there are people being ravaged by war and starvation in this world, so your life can't be all that bad. Funny you should say that. I agree. BUT, at the same time, 'not so bad' is not the same as 'good'. I used to see a lot of people who would complain about things that they had control over, and I'd think to myself that they made their beds and were responsible for their own situations. I always thought I would never do that! (How wrong I was.) After making some of my own mistakes, I realized that I hadn't been taking responsibility for myself after all and that plenty of work was to be done. (Eureka!) Since I'm the kind of person who likes to find the moral of every story and learn from every experience, that realization also led me to believe that if I worked hard enough to be a better person, took responsibility for all my actions, and tried to maintain a good outlook, that life would be all peaches and no suck. Because when life sucks, it has to be for a reason, right?
Well, now I know better. Sometimes it sucks just because.
But that's no reason to give up. No life is FUBAR!
