Beyond the Magic Bullet

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Just like that: my debt was gone.

Well, not quite all. The two loans I’d taken out to finance my expensive Hawaiian honeymoon still loomed at the periphery. But almost all of my credit card debt? Wiped out entirely. I call that moment my magic bullet.

I won’t go into the circumstances of how the magic bullet came about. The only thing important is that it did not come from me. I did not earn all those zeroes in my credit ledger. They were given to me.

At this point in the story, I am forced to look at my own character. I wouldn’t say all my upbringing was hardscrabble, but a lot of it was. More often than not – especially in the latter half of my high school years – I was poor. Whenever we got a little bit of money, we immediately spent it. On things we wanted, things that had been out of reach mere days ago. Food that was slightly more elevated than the food pantry handouts we sometimes endured. Books. Comics. Nintendo games. I got a paper route at fifteen and my Friday night riches went toward Saturday afternoon indulgence: always the movies, a new paperback, a lunch out. The money never lasted.

I bought my first hardcover book in 1991 with money I borrowed and paid back in installments. I’ve long thought of that moment – the adrenaline high of it, the satisfaction – as the first time I bought a hardcover with my own money. And it was, after a fashion. But I hadn’t had the discipline to save. It was easier to pay back than save up. I ingrained that inside myself.

I can’t entirely blame the way I was brought up with the way I stayed. At some point, childhood trauma stops being a reason and starts being an excuse. You’re supposed to put those things into context and find ways to forge ahead. Become your own person. In a lot of ways, I was able. But financially, I was resistant.

Because look: immediately after high school, I had to live on my own. I never took an economics class. I lived week to week in a rooming house where a lot of my retail paycheck went toward rent and store-brand food and whatever I had left went, as always, to books and movies. Maybe I felt like this was a virtue. Maybe I just didn’t know any better. I got a credit card and immediately ruined my credit. I was nineteen, living on my own, having to pay cash for everything because I didn’t know how credit worked and it didn’t seem important to learn.

I worked three different jobs at the mall to afford to live and eat, and when I finally got an office job, I still worked second and third jobs. Working until I was too tired to think was never the issue. It was what I did with the money I brought home. It evaporated. I paid minimums and lived hand-to-mouth and once in a while – on my birthday, at tax time – I’d get some extra cash and I could buy an expensive book or go on a trip. That seemed a good enough way to live for a very long time. I was able to keep getting credit cards because I always paid the minimum and I always paid on time. Credit card companies loved me. I kept opening new cards and that would be "new money! I need to spend it!" and then the cycle would start anew.

$31,000. That was how much debt I was in when the magic bullet came and erased about 80% of it. I was not young. I was not naïve. This was four years ago. Four years ago and I was living fairly close to debt free.

It took less than a year not only to get back to where I’d been (Disney was the main culprit; you can't go four times a year and not have it bite you, but it was also nickel and dime stuff like going out to eat a lot and buying books I didn't read), but to add more. It’s that more that was important. It became the key on which all of this turned.

 My friend Jeff and I like to travel. Jeff, who is good with money, has always been able to find deals, use credit card points, make his money work for him. One of his best bits of wisdom is that the older generation looks at things like housing and school as things that are, by and large, affordable, while things like vacations are extravagant indulgences that are best avoided. The opposite is now true. This last week, I went on a cruise ship to the Caribbean using airfare points, a free cabin offer with a small upgrade, and hotel points the day before the cruise. All told, my whole vacation cost about $300, and that’s with inclusive food, drinks, and ports of call. But this is now and that is then.

What happened is that Jeff and I were vacationing a lot for a while, and it eventually came out that I owed him $4000. I honestly didn’t know that until he laid it all out. And of course I panicked, because panic is part of Friday night riches. When that money is gone, it’s gone, and suddenly you’re terrified that what’s coming in isn’t enough. And that it won’t ever be enough. Until I do have enough, and then I pay off the debt, and immediately get back in, and panic again. It’s a cycle.

I think I told Jeff that my tax return would cover some of what I owed him, and that I’d figure out a way to pay him back in installments. He stopped me and told me he had a better idea, if I’d be willing to do it. Hesitant, I agreed.

For Christmas that year, Jeff constructed The Spreadsheet. It had a few different pages: a snapshot of my current financial status – all my loans (bank and personal), all my living expenses, all my debts, and what money I had coming in – a progress tracker, and a freelance worksheet. Dully, I stared at my debt number:

$35,004.

I looked at my living expenses. My paycheck. What I owed. Everything I owed. It seemed impossible. I wanted to cry.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Jeff said. “We are going to whittle away at this. Every Sunday, we’re going to check in and see what progress you’ve made. We will be strategic, and before long, all this will snowball.”

“I owe too much,” I told him. “It’s not going to work.”

“It will. But you’re going to have to make some choices.”

I expected him to tell me that the big trips were done. That going to my local watering hole once a week – Wusong Wednesday – was to be put on hold. He said none of those things. Wusong became a line expense, because it was my most imperative ongoing indulgence. Vacations, he explained, were managed with points and deals, things where we could spend very little on and still have a great time. Life wasn’t going to stop. Fun wasn’t going to stop.

But the way I handled Friday night riches would stop. Because it was a toxic way of thinking and it was going to keep hurting me in the long run. I had to stop treating money the way I did in 1994.

I chipped away. God, it was so slow at first. We hit the loans first because they kind of sneakily had the highest interest. At the same time, I started working harder than ever at becoming a better artist so that I could earn more at design. I wrote better so I could sell articles. Part of the reason I wrote New England Tiki was so I could sell enough books to clear one of my loans. The podcast started making money so I started putting more into it: deeper and more intensive research, reading, writing. I began doing speaking engagements. Working hard – working constantly – has never been alien to me, but using it in a constructive way was.

Every week, I saw those loans go down, down, down. And then it was the credit card with the smallest balance. Then the next one, and it was easier because I didn’t have to allocate across so many avenues. Every time I paid off a debt, we shifted allocations so that I could shovel money at something else. Soon enough, that adrenaline rush I got from buying stuff became the adrenaline rush from paying things down. Inching closer and closer to being debt-free. The Spreadsheet has shifted and changed over the last two-plus years, but it’s been a constant in my mind. Sometimes I can’t sleep and I think about those numbers.

We are getting to the very end of my credit card debt. A few more months of paychecks and freelance should do it. Then all that’s left is that last personal loan to Jeff, and I will be debt-free. I can start saving. I can start preparing for the what-next before the what-next happens.

Sometimes I kick myself for not taking advantage of the lacuna that the magic bullet should have afforded me. One time, I was somehow working two full-time jobs and saved none of that money. I think of where I could be now if I hadn’t felt compelled to spend as quickly as I made.

But I think … I mean maybe forty-seven is awfully old to learn why financial stability is important and necessary. Now I’m almost fifty, and I think I might have needed to experience the magic bullet and fuck it up in order to really understand what I was doing and why I was doing it. To reckon with a way of thinking about money that had never been quite healthy, and which was was moored in the swamp I should have trudged out of decades ago.

I’m not clear yet, but I’m getting there. I’m getting there.