When the statements piled up and the creditors started calling, I had to do the unthinkable -- confront my mounting debt. It was December of last year, a few weeks before Christmas, and I was buying a present at Barnes & Noble. “Do you have another credit card?” asked the salesman. “This one doesn’t want to go through.” How gracious of him to make it sound like the credit card’s fault. That credit card was such a coward, always chickening out in the face of a crucial transaction. Unfortunately, I did not have another credit card. Well, actually, I had three, but experience had proved they didn’t want to go through, either. There was a time when this exchange would have flustered me, left me
I was debt-free once. I had paid off my student loan and had no consumer debt. I thought I would immediately start spending my suddenly-increased disposable income but I didn’t. Instead I found that I was very cautious with my money until I made the choice to go back into debt via a mortgage. It turns out that I was like most debt-free people. It takes a lot of work to become debt-free and those lessons tend to stick with people. Patrick Demers* recently became debt-free but it took him four years to get rid of $30,000 of debt. He says in an email interview, “I had accumulated a considerable amount of school debt, credit card debt and went through a stretch of being unemployed for roughly si
