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Confessions of A Serial Spender- Part Three

7/31/2015

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In 2011, I owned four homes and had $80,000 in credit card debt. Three of the homes were rented and I was working and making fairly decent money, but every month had become a juggling act that would have easily been a headliner for Cirque Solei.    I remember someone I worked with telling me that she had filed bankruptcy because she realized she was 200.00 a short a month on everything she owed.  I felt so superior.  $200.00 short?  I was running $600.00 short and still hadn’t missed a payment!  What a loser!

Lost in my financial haze, I don’t know how I made it work.  An income tax return bought me a couple of months and then there was that 401K I kept pulling from.  I bought lottery tickets and dreamed not so much of retiring, but of just somehow, getting out from under what had become not an elephant sitting on me, but a herd of elephants.

There was no one to confide in, no one to advise me.  I was embarrassed and ashamed.  I couldn’t even tell the D-Man.

It is so cliché to say that good things sometimes come out of bad things happening, but it is true.

My mother passed away at the end of 2011.  She had been renting one of my homes from me and after she died, it sat empty for three months.  On top of credit card debt, I now had to try to make a home payment with no rent money coming in.  A second one had a tenant leave in the middle of their lease.

I went in to have my taxes done and thought maybe I could get a couple more months of keeping the circus running.  Not to be. You know how they tell you to NEVER pull money out of your 401K to pay credit card debt?  Yes, I had heard that, but that didn’t apply to The Girl In The Band!

Imagine how Ms. Superior felt when an accountant I had just paid a good amount of money to (now you know why I do Turbo Tax) looked me in the eye and said, “That money you pulled out of your retirement fund really hurt your taxes this year.  You owe the IRS over $9,000.00.  Did you want to write a check?”

Did I want to write a check?  Sure.  Problem was, I would have been about $8,995.00 short in my checking account.

It was over.  The juggling act was leaving the big top.  I walked out of the accountant’s office and seriously considered driving my truck off a cliff.  The only thing was, I figured I would just end up totaling it and it was actually paid for!

We had a week long gig coming up at a casino in Arizona.  It would give me one more month of making the credit card payments and then, unless the Super Lotto came in, I was done.

During the week away, I managed to put it out of my mind.  Coming home though, I felt like I was driving back into a tornado waiting for me.  Four hours in the truck, with Eric, my bass player riding shotgun, I couldn’t hold it in anymore.

I started telling Eric the whole story.  How bad the credit card debt was, my now huge tax bill, everything. That making minimum payments every month was really only chipping at about 50.00 per month of the almost six figures I owed.  He didn’t really say anything until we were driving down my street.  Then he looked at me and said something very simple and obvious.  The something I had run from for so long.

“You have to do something about it.  Debt settlement, bankruptcy, something.  You will NEVER be able to pay off $80,000 in credit cards and you know that.  You have to stop what you are doing and admit it. It can be fixed, but you have to fix it.”

“I know people who have done debt settlement,” he told me.  “I will get you some phone numbers. Call them Monday.”

He texted me the numbers when he got back to his house.

Monday morning, back at my office, I closed the door.  It was finally over.  I admitted defeat.  I had lost.  Eric’s mini-intervention had made it clear.  Like every other type of addict, I had hit rock bottom.

I picked up the phone and started dialing……..

 


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Confessions of A Serial Spender Part Two

7/17/2015

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2004, the beginning of my Livin La Vida Loca period, did not happen overnight.  I had been a Serial Spender almost my entire life.   Was it “nature or nurture”? I cannot say for sure whether I was born this way or a product of my environment.

I will say I didn’t have the best of home training. My mother’s first piece of financial advice to me was that if you wanted to buy something, instead of paying cash, make a credit card payment so you made your payment on time and then charge the item.  I don’t think I have ever heard Suze Orman give that particular tip.

Not that I am making excuses, but I can honestly say I have spent close to 90% of my adult life living beyond my means.  I remember going to buy a car one time and warning the credit manager I had a lot of debt.  He took one look at my credit report and said, “My, you live well don’t you?”

Yes, I did.  Problem was, being a Serial Spender never had too many consequences and I am a firm believer that you never learn hard lessons without consequences.

In my early 20s, after some bad choices with credit cards, I let a couple go to collections.  It came back to bite me when I went to buy my first home, but at that time, you wrote a letter detailing what had happened.  In most cases, they still gave you a loan, so other than spending a day coming up with something that was really rather creative, I wasn’t put out much.

“Well, obviously you have changed,” I remember the loan officer saying.  “You managed to save up for the down payment.”

Yeah.  Well, about that down payment. I had never had a savings account in my entire life with more than a three digit figure.  My grandfather had left me some money and for once in my life, I didn’t blow it on clothes, shoes, concerts and nights out.  I did the right thing and invested in something that had value.

Owning your own home is wonderful.  But the downside, is it becomes one more thing to spend money on.

 Every time things got a little backed up, I got bailed out by something. A loan from family, a refinance on my house, an income tax return. There were no interventions and I danced on the edge so many times, it became a way of life.

So in 2004, with ample credit, a job at a financial institution and having come off one of the most difficult years of my life, Livin La Vida Loca kicked in

I would share details of how the train got away from me, but to be honest, I don’t really remember. There were vacations, furniture and clothes.   Santa would have fainted if he saw my Christmas bills.   Other people bought t-shirts when they went on a trip to another town.  I bought two investment properties.

Yet, I was making the minimum payments, so it was cool right? 

What I failed to notice, was how much the minimum payments were increasing.  I remember lying in bed one night, after ordering an expensive television for my mother, having just maxed out one more credit card. And feeling a sick feeling in my stomach, realizing I wasn’t going to be able to make the minimum payments.

When I finally managed to add up everything I owed in credit card debt, I was in shock.  It was $80,000. More than I owed on one of my houses.

For most people that would have been an epiphany.  Not a Serial Spender, who also happens to be a stubborn Capricorn.  It became a challenge.

I would figure out a way to pay it off!

Next up, the denial and insanity of my pre-bankruptcy life.


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The Power of Music

7/5/2015

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The D-Man and I have returned from a week-long vacation in Wisconsin.

We stayed in quaint Port Washington, tasted wine in scenic Cedarburg, and enjoyed drinks and shopping at the Bay Shore Town Center and Historic Third Ward district in Milwaukee.  Of course no trip to Wisconsin at the end of June would be complete without a trip to the greatest music festival in the world, Summerfest on Milwaukee’s downtown lakefront.  We saw great local bands, as well as two great sets by Aloe Blacc and Big Head Todd and The Monsters.

I also reconnected with two musician friends that I had played with in my mid-twenties. My old bass player and I got to see our former guitar player in his country band, The Rocky Oster Mountain Band.  After his show, we spent the rest of the evening checking out other bands and laughing over old band stories.  Even after all these years, it felt like we had only been apart a couple of months.

The only part of the trip that was difficult, was visiting my uncle in a nursing home.  Last year, I had spent a few days with him at his house and although not totally self-sufficient, with weekly home care visits, he was doing pretty well on his own.  One morning we sat in his kitchen and listened to his Bose cd player.  As the music of Dean Martin and John Williams movie scores filled the house, he talked about how much I loved to listen to music with him when I was a little girl. 

“You would ask me to play Elvin and The Chipmunks over and over again,” he laughed.

The last year has not been good to him and when I went to the nursing home the first day, after about ten minutes, he told me he had nothing more to say.  Even trying to prod him into telling some of the old stories he loved to tell was unsuccessful.  As I left, I asked if he wanted anything from his house.

“I could bring your cd player over and your cds.”

He brightened up just a little. “That would be fine,” he said

The next day, I brought it over and hooked it up.  We listened to John Williams’s greatest hits and although last year, he knew every single one, this time around, he only remembered the Superman theme.  It was the first time I saw him smile.

By the end of the week, when I came to see him, he asked, “Can somebody please change the cd? And can you go the house to get the rest of them?” 

We spent the last morning listening to the soundtracks from The Music Man, Mary Poppins and The King and I.  He not only remembered the songs, he remembered who sang them and at times, even sang along, smiling and tapping his feet on the foot guards on his wheelchair.

My vacation usually doesn’t have a theme, but coming home on the plane, I realized this one did.  Friends brought together and an older man, depressed, finally feeling some joy.  What did it have in common?  The power of music.  Time for me to get back to playing some myself.

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