Reader Story: I’m Done with Debt

Thanks for sharing your story, Andrew. I will have to share this with my brother, who is graduating college this year. I could see him having the same story to tell if he doesn’t change his habits. He has a hard time saying “no” to friends and although he generally pays cash, he doesn’t save anything. From your story, it sounds like you used to have the same habits he has. The thing is, my brother doesn’t seem to care. Maybe this will inspire him.

Thanks for sharing this Andrew. Sounds like you have learned some hard lessons but you are young and have a lot of years to get things back on track.

Hope you can continue to stay focused and things continue to improve in your financial future.

I’m sorry, but it sickens me to read of people like this writer who simply discharge their debt with bankruptcy and then continue on the same path once again with no remorse for those they’ve screwed over. People who get themselves into this predicament shouldn’t be able to simply walk away as this writer did and consider themselves “debt free”. Thank goodness the government (IRS) and student loans aren’t bankruptable. At least people can’t completely scam the system. Bankruptcy is an option for thiefs and cowards.

Great story. The important thing is you have learned from this and are taking the right steps to have a great life. Sounds like you have a good plan going for you. Keep up the good work.

Its hard to have respect for somebody who really just gave up and cried uncle (filed bankruptcy).

What has this guy really accomplished, other than giving up and starting over?

Nothing.

I am not really impressed.

Show me someone who has actually worked hard and made sacrifices to achieve something. Then I will listen.

I would not say so as harshly as Mark, but I also think that the writer took the easy way out and it makes me angry because I (as a taxpayer and credit card user) get left paying for his choice. He says that he has the income but just isn’t good at budgeting – well maybe he should consider paying back his debt with his income, after all, HE is the one who consumed all those dinners, lived in that house, bought that whatever – why shouldn’t he pay for those things now?

This writer has inspired me!! I am $11,000 in debt but instead of paying it back I am going to file for bankruptcy. That way I will be able to save $10,000 this year, with enough leftover to pay for a gym membership.

I’m sorry but that wasn’t very inspiring at all.

I concur with Mark, Dee and Elliot.

“Please begin to think for yourself rather than buying the dogma of corporations…”

You, of course, make the false assumption that people who disagree with bankruptcy align themselves with corporations. We align ourselves with integrity: if we are responsible enough to borrow money, we are responsible enough to pay back what we owe. That is not corporate thinking, but understanding and accepting responsibility.

I’m sorry Kyle but I’m not buying what you’re selling , “Accordingly, if you do not raise the presumption of abuse, then it is presumed that the creditors were abusive in extending the credit in the first place. Think about it, they are in the best position to make credit-worthiness decisions every day. They know the risks and have full benefit of access to a minimum of 9 types of credit reports including personality profiling.”

Creditors abusive? In my 52 years of walking this earth not once has a creditor pulled me off the street or out of my house and demanded that I use their credit card or else.

The choice to use that credit card is mine and mine alone. Whatever happened to personal responsibility?

“No one’s going to want to share any stories at all where they admit any sort of past failing if this is the sort of response we always see.”

Heck, even stories of past success get flamed here. And Tyler, you haven’t always been nice, either (though, to be fair, I’ve written my share of negative comments too; I stopped after my post ran here and got 150+ negative comments.)

It falls on the author to deal with this with a thick skin and to not let the haters get to him/her. Which is unfortunate. But at least the haters hate pretty much everyone who runs a story here–rich or poor; mistakes or no.

-Erica

The first thing I noticed about Andrew’s story was that he declared bankruptcy and then went off on vacation to Europe. Wow! Sounds little like these recent bank bail outs, but in a very small scale. You create a financial disaster, get “bailed out” and then go on a vacation to celebrate your freedom while you leave your debtors holding the bag. Hmmm…somehow that does not sit comfortably with me. But as a fellow recovering “debt-addict” I have to add that I’m pleased to read that Andrew is on the way to recovery. Little more humility about your past might be a good thing. Your story is a hard read for those of us who spent years and years paying off our debt the old fashioned of actually paying it off. But then none of us are perfect and we make the best choices we know how at the time. Good luck in your future recovery!

I just want to be clear that I wasn’t hating on Tyler or the choices he made. What’s done is done and the only thing one can do is move forward and hopefully not make the same mistakes again. And hopefully by telling his story helping someone else to make better choices.

What I am “hating” on, and I’m not sure that is the right word, is for people to excuse those poor choices by saying it was someone else’s fault aka the credit card companies.

Also, I think J.D.’s right: In general, this site has some of the best commenters on the internet. Compare to youtube for contrast.

However, on days like today, I wonder if that’s not so much because of the community, but because of the de facto rules that the community has to abide by. Discussion of politics and religion are effectively verboten, which I’m sure keeps out a lot of vitriol. The math beyond the actual financial aspect of the site is generally simple and not really up for debate, it’s either correct or it isn’t.

We operate in a bit of a walled garden here where we pretend a lot of the things in the world that cause arguments don’t exist. Hence no mentions of “Obamacare” or Islamic extremists or the tea party. When people venture outside the walled garden and bring in a bit of unpleasantness from the real world, like bankruptcy, people start throwing around derogatory judgements of guest posters.

This comment’s not meant to convince anyone of anything, it’s just an expression of some of the thoughts I was having while reading other comments on today’s article.

emma (#17): “Whatever happened to personal responsibility?”

Isn’t this a story about someone TAKING personal responsibility? I thought most GRS readers were in situations similar to the original poster: we are or have been in serious debt, we need help budgeting, we’re not sitting around with silver spoons in our mouths. We’re reading this to learn how to improve our situation, not to gloat about how morally superior we are to folks who’ve made mistakes.

And yes, he made stupid mistakes. He admits as much. So did JD, but we read his site. So did I, but I’m working on my debt just like anyone. It’s why I’m here.

If we didn’t have access to bankruptcy, we’d still have debtor’s prisons. Is this what the critical readers would prefer? Lock him up and throw away the key because he bought some real estate when he was 20? Come on.

Thanks for sharing your story, Andrew. Don’t let the turkeys get you down.

Andrew,

Good luck. I know you can’t feel good about the past mistakes, but you can feel really good knowing you’ve found good tools and hopefully good support in making the right choices going forward. Sure, you had some fun with a life of debt, but you realized it’s not a long term plan. Now you can make better use of your money by using it efficiently rather than wastefully, and you can be prepared for your future, whether it’s family, travel or retirement. Stick with it!

Jason

I think this writer had it very easy. He had safety nets whenever he turned around. He lived with parents, fell back on the bankruptcy and then lived with parents yet again? I don’t know many people – any really – who could do this. While it is nice to think or imagine that one could have that easy-out, I think many people have too much pride for that. There is real satisfaction in making it on your own, correcting your own mistakes and sustaining yourself by your own means. I think that this writing is missing out on a lot of this satisfaction and will not be truly successful and possibly fail yet again, until he achieves some of this and can experience what it really feels like.

I read this post earlier today and had come back after thinking about it for several hours.

There are several issues here for me. The first one being that I think it is difficult to accept some of Andrew’s assertions because he is so clearly at the beginning of his financial “journey”. He has some very optimistic goals, but not a lot of past precedence to make those goals seem realistic (to me).

I am supportive of people declaring bankruptcy when they get overwhelmed by debt. But, it is hard for me to understand how one is overwhelmed with debt when the month after going through bankruptcy, the person is off on a trip to Europe, using *cash*. Where did that cash come from? That is a pretty large amount of money to spend, no matter who is looking at it. Besides it being a bad financial decision (since there were still medical bills, taxes, etc)…there doesn’t seem to be any indication on the part of the author that clearly he had more money than he represented during bankruptcy hearings. Just acknowledging it as a bad decision doesn’t show me that you have learned anything from it.

Right now, the author is an unreliable narrator. It is not that I doubt his desire to change, or the basic ability to get himself out of debt…but he hasn’t done that yet. It’s not that I don’t want to read stories about people succeeding, I do, but this story seems to be more analogous to someone who wants to lose weight who is telling us about their awesome plan to drop a ton of weight really quickly, because that is totally possible, even though they spent the last 10 years gaining 150 extra pounds. And they are going to keep on eating some really yummy (and fattening) desserts while they quickly lose the weight they have planned.

Losing weight in those circumstances is certainly possible, and a very small minority of people may be able to do that. But rarely is weight loss done healthily in that kind of method, and rarely does it last.

For me, I wished that we were a year from now with Andrew and he was telling us that he was truly debt free, with savings and had lived a while with the “maintenance” part of financial responsibility. Because this post seems more aspirational at this moment than realistic. You’ve shown us the mistakes you made getting into debt, but you haven’t lived the mistakes and learning that you go through getting out of debt, because it hasn’t yet happened.

Good luck with your financial makeover Andrew, I hope you are successful.

That’s a great story, and very well written. Good job, Andrew, on moving on after your mistakes and sharing your problems and solutions with the rest of us. There is a lot of valuable information to take away from this post

The great thing about this story is that Andrew knows what he’s doing now. He’s never going bankrupt again. He’s trying to never even go into debt again. Even if you think bankruptcy in his circumstances was a horrible choice, you can now feel good that he has changed into the sort of guy who will never make that kind of choice again. He is dedicated to learning more about personal finance, and from now on, he’ll be making choices based on a lot more knowledge and information.

And he also now knows that things come up–both things you should have expected (like taxes) and things you don’t expect (like injuries and bad break-ups), and emergency funds can save people from all manner of terrible decisions.

For those who are surprised he could afford to pay for a vacation in cash right after a bankruptcy, remember that he went with a bunch of friends, so they were probably sharing a lot of expenses, and remember that he said he was making decent money but just not managing it well.

I have to admit, the bankruptcy, “debt-free” comment did cause my gut to clench just a bit, particularly in these times. On the other hand, a friend of mine is continuing to throw money at a duplex in CA that he bought for $300K and is now worth $95K. He is 30 years old and unmarried, and shares a house far out of town with 3-4 roommates so he can continue making payments. I have to respect his integrity, but his story is the other extreme, with a single bad financial decision now controlling his life.

I don’t know what the right answer is. I settled with a credit card company my last year of college, for about 10% of what I owed. Did I spend that money foolishly? Hell yeah. I don’t know how many lattes and late-night pizzas I bought with that credit card, but trust me: they were legion. It affected me, though, and like Andrew I used cash and nothing but cash for the next three years, even to the point of stupidity (long story, but I lived overseas and calls with a credit card were .10/min and calls with cash were .75/min).

The fact is, we are all young and stupid sometimes, and the important thing is to continue to educate ourselves on where these kinds of decisions can lead.

I think one of the reasons that there are so many negative comments on the story (besides the bankruptcy) is that the author hasn’t actually done anything yet. It’s as if someone told a story of years of unsucessful dieting but then said they had a revelation and figured they could loose 50 lbs this year. Well…ok but what makes us think it will be different this time? Realization is the first step but it doesn’t always lead to actions. Hope to hear a follow-up in a year.

I just wanted to reply to Erica Douglass’ comments. She stated: “For some reason, this site attracts people of certain viewpoints, and when someone writes a story that doesn’t fit their view, the comments get nasty. I can tell you that it discourages a lot of people from sharing stories.”

I disagree. There are some PF blogs out there that have some VERY cynical, hateful comments – I don’t feel that this is one of them. I do feel that people here are honest, which I think is great and refreshing!

I found it interesting to read Erica’s comments, and then go back and read her guest post. As I recalled, it left me with a bad taste as well. Not because of the choices, but because of the attitude implied by the article. One reason this blog is so great is that JD can share his opinions, and they may be different or even flat-out “wrong” in someone else’s eyes, but he states his opinions respectfully. His writing reflects a humble, approachable attitude – and so have most of the guest posts here! It becomes less about money and more about real, honest life.

In summary to this massively long, probably strangely-worded comment: I have learned so, so, so much from both JD, guest writers, and the comments! It is absolutely my favorite place to turn to for advice in financial matters. Keep it up!

L, here is the post that describes the background I have and the reason I’m no longer “humble”:

http://www.erica.biz/2009/how-do-all-those-idiots-make-so-much-money/

By the way, “humble” is just another American accepted cultural norm.

-Erica