I suppose I imagined that when other people saw my car they were impressed. It didn’t occur to me that most people couldn’t have cared less. It became extremely clear that my values had changed. What I wasn’t clear about was how exactly I had gotten there.
I grew up in a large home, but certainly not a mansion by any stretch of the imagination. I had friends across town who had elevators in their homes and other costly luxuries, and there was always a shard of jealousy in my heart.
Saratoga Springs is a wealthy town, and I grew up knowing a lot of affluent people with expensive tastes. I knew what I liked and how I wanted to live my life. Looking back, I realize now that I had issues from a very young age with coveting what others had. I always wanted more stuff and would constantly compare what I had to others, to measure if I was keeping up.
Growing up, I remember giving many of my friends a tour of our home. I would lead them through all six bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms, and along the paths of seventeen acres of land, most of it beautifully landscaped by my mom, who was a master gardener. I would find myself thinking about how lucky they must think I was. This feeling continued into adulthood, often leading to my making purchases simply to keep up with others and fit in. I loved the feeling of having something that someone else didn’t have; it made me feel special and gave me value.
Values are taught at an early age, and I am not sure where I was taught to value money and possessions the way I did. I don’t remember my parents teaching it to me. They never wore flashy clothes or put much stock in appearances. We drove older cars and didn’t travel much. Somewhere along the path of my life, I started to attach values to purchases and objects. When Mark and I got married, I never realized how ingrained this had become in my mind.
When our first holiday season came around, I knew I needed to decorate our apartment to make it feel warm and inviting for both of us. My family had always decorated for Christmas the day after Thanksgiving, and this was the first year I hadn’t been home to help. I wanted to continue the tradition, so off I went to T.J. Maxx in search of the perfect two-foot Christmas tree.
When I walked into the apartment later that night, $200 more in debt, I felt as if I had just walked out of a fog. I had no idea what had just happened. How had everything just landed in my cart, and how had I used my credit card without being aware of it? I had only gone into the store for a Christmas tree, but everything else was just so cute! I came home with enough stuff to decorate our entire apartment.
Those surprise purchases that I would “accidentally” make kept on happening. Except I could no longer consider them accidents. I was keenly aware that I had a problem, but I had no idea how to fix it. There were moments of strength where I could say no and be so proud of myself, but there were many more moments of weakness.
Not surprisingly, our first arguments as a married couple were all about money. I would want to buy something that Mark felt was unnecessary. I started off our marriage as a Spender, and my problem would continue to get worse and worse until I hit my breaking point.
Three months after I earned the free car, we moved from our small starter home in upstate New York to Fort Mill, South Carolina. We had purchased a brand-new home on a whim while on vacation visiting Mark’s brothers. They had moved to Fort Mill to be part of a ministry start-up, and we hadn’t seen them in a while. We went to visit and left as home owners, purchasing a house just two houses down from the one his brother was renting. We had no intention of buying a house when we went to visit, and came home wondering what the heck we had just done. I was very good at making impulsive decisions, and Mark was easily swayed. It was a brand-new construction; we built it from the ground up. It was our dream house. We put zero percent down and had to go home and sell our house. There were at least a dozen times when I thought to myself, “What did we just do?” But we pressed on and moved forward with our decision. We sold our home in New York for $80,000 and moved to South Carolina into our brand-new $225,000 house.
Mark drove our Audi and I drove my brand-new luxury car straight through the night with my son sleeping in the back. All of our belongings were packed into a moving truck and driven down behind us. We had a dream, and we couldn’t acknowledge that it—the American dream—was killing us! As we pulled into the driveway of our custom-built house, our debt was growing as high and fast as the weeds around our brand-new foundation. Our debt had now passed $40,000, but we still had our Audi and our free company car, and we looked as if we had it all, including a beautiful new house.
The stress of keeping up with the bills was giving me daily anxiety. Mark didn’t know that we had so much debt, because I didn’t tell him. I figured it would only start a fight, and I was trying to take care of it on my own.
The stress became too much. Five months into living in our new house, while sitting on our plush couch inside our custom bedroom suite, I made the decision to start the money talk that would change everything. I knew I had to come clean with Mark about how much debt I had racked up. The secrets I had been keeping from him about my spending habits were getting too heavy to carry all on my own.
There were many days when the truth of how much debt I had gotten us in was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. That afternoon, I sat on that couch crying, feeling the sting of guilt, regret, and fear. For a long time I had wanted to tell Mark, but I was afraid of his reaction and how resentful he might be. To make matters worse, we were already underwater on our mortgage in the home we had custom built just six short months before. Our builder went bankrupt halfway through completing our development, and our neighborhood was left in shambles, with half-built houses, construction debris, and lost hopes. The thrill of owning a huge home was over, and the reality of our dangerous situation was starting to kick in.
I called Mark up into our master bedroom after Andrew was put down for bed that night. Mark was working remotely from home at that time for the same actuarial company that he worked for when we lived in New York. He walked into the room not expecting what I was about to tell him.
I finally blurted out, “Can we take equity out of our home?” I thought to myself, “Oh no, I can’t turn back now. I have to do it. I am so scared. Will he leave me? Will he be so mad he can’t forgive me?”
What I didn’t know was that Mark knew what I was about to confess, but was in denial. He knew we had credit card balances, but he didn’t know the full extent. My day of reckoning had come, and I had to tell him. I just couldn’t hide any longer.
I laid out all of our credit card statements on our bed and told him everything. For the previous four years I had been spending money with reckless abandon. Those shiny plastic cards were just too much fun to play with. I had lost all self-control and ability to say no to my shopping desires.
I would wake up at night and cry, I was so ashamed about how I had handled our money. I was trying to manage the bills and keep the truth from Mark, so he didn’t know how bad it had gotten. I had hidden the last of our credit cards from him; he didn’t know we had over $40,000 in overdue debt. I was so full of shame for not telling him about the cards, and despite his calm and forgiving demeanor, I was terrified to tell the truth out of fear of his anger and disappointment. Mark was also too afraid to ask me how much in debt we were. The problem was that because we weren’t talking about it, the debt kept on growing. We both knew it was going on, but we ignored it. We were in the depths of denial.
We had gotten to the point where if we didn’t have enough money to pay all of our monthly bills, I would ignore one bill to be able to pay off another. Then the next month I would do it all over again, juggling all the bills so that our utilities stayed on. And I did all of this while sitting in our large, expensive custom home that was slowly draining us of every single penny.
What could we do to get ourselves out of this mess? We had been in and out of debt so many times, and I was so sick of it. I wanted to be out of it for good this time, but I had no idea how to make it stick and not plunge right back in again.
I had tried to stop spending cold turkey in the past. But one trip to Target and my goal of no spending would be forgotten. Coming home with a car full of beautiful home-decor pieces made me so happy that I couldn’t grasp the damage I had done until the adrenaline rush had worn off. Then the guilt of what I felt was unbearable, and I would start spending again.
I started to realize that spending wasn’t my real problem, but more a symptom of a larger one. I realized that while I valued certain things, my spending was not a reflection of those values.
Money, life, and heart are inexorably linked, and I was missing the bigger picture. I could not separate my household finances from everyday social interactions, work habits, and my heart and mind. I sat down and thought about that for a while one day, realizing that in order to get out of debt, I needed to change the way I thought. I needed a mind-set shift, one that didn’t involve being mad at Mark because he was making me stick to a budget or not giving me cash to spend.
This is a hard thing for a Spender to grasp. We Spenders usually only see the things that we want, and fail to see how our purchases are affecting others, and we tend to be very impulsive. Once I started to see how my spending was affecting my family, I was able to start making small changes. It was a slow process that required a lot of work and mistakes. It certainly didn’t happen overnight, and there were many more times I messed up and got us into even more trouble.
There were many times when a situation would come up out of the blue as a reminder of my past, and I had major decisions to make. Would I fall back into my old spending habits, or would I stay strong and press on? For example, one day I received a large manila envelope in the mail. Upon opening it I saw that I was being audited for my business two years prior. The letter said that I needed to pay the IRS $17,000 in the next thirty days, because they were disallowing all of my deductions from that business. I called Mark in a panic; not only was I thirty-four weeks pregnant with my second child, but we were finally making progress on paying down debts and sticking to a budget. This was a sucker punch, and I felt myself wanting to shop to deal with the stress.
I called my accountant, and after a nice pep talk from him, we appealed the audit. After a year of going through deductions and having meetings with the IRS, we got the amount down to only $2,500. Owing that instead of $17,000 was a huge relief. But we were still in a lot of credit card debt and now we owed the government another $2,500 we didn’t have. Thankfully we were able to borrow money from family members, with the hope of paying them back quickly.
If being $40,000 in debt, underwater in our mortgage, and running a $1,000-a-month deficit wasn’t enough, I now had to figure out how to get out of debt and stay that way. In order to change the way I managed and viewed money, I had to make some major lifestyle changes.
I was so sick and tired of being broke. I had gotten to the point where the pain of staying in debt was greater than the uncomfortable (and sometimes painful) changes that I needed to make in order to get us out. When the pain of staying in debt is greater than the pain of changing your spending habits, then you will make the changes needed to get out of debt.
If you are a spending addict, you may have told yourself, as I did, that you have the self-control to stop spending money and the ability to stick to a budget when you want to. You may even succeed for a month. But then one bad financial decision pushes you over the edge again. You have to come to a point where the pain of staying broke is greater than the pain of stopping to think about the way you spend money.
I needed to come to grips with that. Did I want to be broke and stressed my entire life? Or was I okay with making some hard decisions and changing for good this time? Could I take that same passion that I had when dancing as a child and turn it toward a passion for being debt-free? Could I harness that good work ethic I used when winning that prestigious car and put it toward getting out of debt? I had some strong character traits that could help me get out of debt, but I needed to start using them to be able to conquer this debt monster.
I realized that in order to get my spending back under control and get out of debt, I needed to take a stand for the principles that guided my everyday life, and make my spending a reflection of what I truly valued. Once I realized that, and set up some strict boundaries for myself, everything started to change for the better. It was a slow change requiring constant boundary setting, but it is possible to be a Recovering Spender.
After all, I am the living proof.