Living in Debt: How I Sacrificed My Future

For those of you who haven’t been following along, I’m in debt.   Starting 13 years ago, when I was 19, I managed to bury myself in debt, until I decided I’d had enough of that…almost 2 years ago.

Why?

It wasn’t because of college expenses, though they contributed to my debt level.  I was in debt before I went to college.  Heck, I was a daddy before I went to college.

It wasn’t because of  major medical procedures.  The only major medical procedures we’ve ever had were the births of our children, and we had two of them well after we built our shackles.

It wasn’t because we bought more house than we could afford.  We own a modest house that we bought before the bubble started.

Then what was it?  Why did we do the things we did that have financially crippled us for so long?

It was a combination of things, crowned by a glorious lack of financial sophistication.  As I wrote in No Brakes, neither of us had the early training to really understand our financial decisions.  We knew bills need to be paid, but what was the difference if the money came from a credit card versus our checking account?   Why did it matter if we carried a balance on the cards, as long as we could make the payments?  What’s wrong with just making the minimum payment?

Naïve.  Unsophisticated.

That day-to-day lack of sophistication was only part of the problem, and it wasn’t the biggest part.  We made a lot mistakes, but they were all small.  Before 2001, I think our total was about $5000.  Too much, but not painful.

Between the fall of 2001 and the winter of 2002, we took our naïve decision-making process and ran with it.  It was a full-scale mistake marathon.

That year, we built an addition on our house, because a full dining room and a bigger kitchen would make our house so much more livable and it was cheaper than buying a home, new.  Oh, and since the difference between the mandatory crawlspace and a full basement room was just a few rows of concrete blocks, let’s expand it.  Wait, don’t bedrooms require walls, sheetrock, windows, closets, paint, furniture, and electricity?

That was also the year that the car companies all jumped on the 0% loan fad.   In case you don’t remember, that was the program that meant you could get a 0% loan on a new car if you picked up a 3 year term on your loan.  At 22, making maybe $45,000 combined, we decided that buying a $35,000 truck was a good idea.  To save money.   Rationalization is wonderful.  Or at least, effective.

That summer, we got married.   We did a phenomenal job getting married on the cheap.  We had about 100 guests, a  park to get married in, flowers, food,  and a hall to eat and dance in, for about $3000.   The problem was, we didn’t have $3000.   We didn’t have the $1500 + activities for our 10 day honeymoon on a Caribbean cruise, either, though I still plan on returning to St. Thomas.

None of those individual payments were terrible.  The biggest problem was that we piled them all so close together that we never had time to absorb their impact before taking on the next obligation.   When we did realize how much we had to pay, we made up for it by only buying big things that came with a “0% for a year” deal, like our living room set, our carpet, and our dining room table.

Then, when we finally did pay something off, or came into more money, we’d immediately expand our lifestyle to fill the void.  The month we paid off our truck, I got a significant raise.  Did we use it to pay off some other debt?  Of course not, we bought a new car on a six year term.

We had so many opportunities to make bad decisions with our money, and I think we took them all and have suffered for it, since.

If you’re in debt, what made you decide to get that way?