This is a hard post to write and an unusual one. Bear with me, please. If you’re bored by personal lollygagging on a politics and wonk blog, click here instead and watch the kitty be adorable.
Today, after a long and arduous process that is years in the making and still not done, I cancelled my credit card, left it at a balance of $0, and took scissors to my card only because I didn’t have a flamethrower handy. I still have debt in the low five figures to pay off, and can’t pay it off as fast as I’d like because I have more school to pay for. (Despite the subject matter of my comic strip for the past week, this is NOT a solicitation for donations. If you must donate, donate to Matt. This website is his literal livelihood.)
But it’s an important step. So’s this: I have a problem with debt that I have no excuse for. I have a problem with spending money that I have not yet earnt. I am a shopaholic. I am an addict.
This addiction has not destroyed my liver, my health, or any of my brain cells. But it nonetheless has hurt my life, and it is a source of shame. I’m posting this post for two reasons: first, to see if my story will resonate with anyone out there who has the same problem, and secondly, well… I’ll get to that.
Debt is a problem and a fact of life for just about everyone. The average person in my province carries $15,000 in debt – and Canadian money is on par with U.S. money now, so it’s not like the Monopoly money of decades past. I have carried levels of debt that are over that number, and thankfully my present level of debt is under that. But that’s nothing to be proud of, because many other people at least have the excuse of buying a house or a car or taking care of sick relatives or their kids. I don’t have kids, sick relatives, or a car, or my own house – or even, I’m ashamed to say, my own apartment. I live with my parents, and whatever age it’s still acceptable to still be doing that? I breezed past that age a LONG time ago.
Some of that debt went towards school, but if I’m being honest I would have to admit that my schooling would barely account for 15% of that. The rest was basically wasted. Wasted on intangibles like nights out, or on tangibles like books and movies and games and comics that I have way, WAY too many of. You can’t see my desk, but I have three of them, in addition to shelves on the walls, all packed full of this crap – and I still need to store books on the floor and every available surface. None of it spent on savings, or anything of any lasting value. And all of it exacerbated by credit cards, which I used too freely and paid the price for.
Credit cards are like a drug cartel that lives in your wallet, and instead of asking for money up front for a hit, they will give you the hit for what feels like ‘free’ but that is compounded at rates that would make a loan shark blush. “Just for emergencies,” they will say to me, as an excuse for me to carry one. And there are people who really can use their credit cards in the event of an emergency only, just like some people can drink “only a little.” The hardest part of all of this has been accepting that I’m not one of those people. That putting a credit card in my wallet is asking for trouble.
The second hardest part is telling myself that this does not make me less of a person. I just have a problem, and I can have this problem and still hold my head up high. It’ll no doubt shock you to learn that someone who read comics and played RPGs in high school (and still does both) had, shall we say, some self-esteem issues. Issues I’ve overcome, but there is still a tiny voice inside that tells me that real men don’t have addictions to spending money. It’s pride that kills the addict, because it makes them too proud to admit they are an addict.
Why did I dive so thoroughly into debt for no good reason? I bought it all because buying it made me feel good. I wanted all of this stuff. I wanted that stack of out of print comics, that RPG supplement I was never going to use but that looked cool, that replica samurai sword and that kickass cellular telephone. I knew that the debt numbers were going up, but I couldn’t get myself to say ‘no’ often enough that the number would go down. I worked 40 hours a week in addition to school. I was entitled, dammit. All my friends were moving on with their lives and buying stuff like big-screen TVs, so why the hell couldn’t I? It just wasn’t fair that I was broke and they weren’t. And with a credit card, you never have to feel broke. Until it runs out, and then all of a sudden, holy shit are you broke.
I’ve hit that level a few times. Finally I looked in the mirror, admitted that I had a problem, went to the bank and got a consolidation loan together. The bank was happy to lend to me, since it means interest rates go to them instead of a credit card company. Those of you reading might ask “why bother with that loan, aren’t you just trading one villain for another?” And the answer is twofold. First, the bank is charging a much lower rate of interest, and secondly, unlike with a credit card – once I’ve paid off a chunk of the loan, that chunk doesn’t leave me with more room to succumb to my problem and get back into debt. The numbers on the loan never go up, only down. The nature of the loan keeps me honest.
And that’s the second reason why I’ve written this blog post. If I posted it on my long-dormant blog, well, no one’d read it but maybe three people, two or which are strangers. But OsborneInk.com sees a lot of traffic, and that translates into a lot of people to keep me honest. A promise to yourself you can break, since you don’t mind hurting yourself. But a promise to someone else? That’s a tough one. You can’t break too many of those and still be that good a person.
So my statement before everyone reading this and the man hosting the website: by December 2013, I will not owe a dime to anyone. Feel free to hold me to that.
My message to anyone with this problem is this: you are not less of a person because of this problem and your friends will not make fun of you if they are friends worthy of the name. I know it’s hard. I know that there are very few institutions in modern society that want to help you and an overwhelming number that want you to stay an addict, since they make money off of you buying from them. But you’re much stronger than you think you are.
You just teach yourself to say ‘no’ by default to spending anything. You learn to pick up cheapness as a sense – you learn that generic ibuprofen is identical to Advil down to the molecule and you save three or four dollars that way. You wait until Cheap Tuesday for a movie, or until that game is discounted. You learn to cook instead of buying horrible crap from fast food restaurants. You can escape. You can be free. All of us can be free.
I can tell you this: after I destroyed that credit card a few hours ago, I could have just about fucked a dinosaur, I was so happy. A real dinosaur, and not these bullshit modern dinosaurs with feathers that science half-heartedly is trying to convince us are how dinosaurs looked. Two years from now when I am debt-free and in unprecedented control of my economic destiny, I will fly into outer space and give hard loving to the Moon.
December 2013, babe. It’s a date.
Thank you, everyone, for your time.
By Magic Love Hose. Talk to him here!
