When I was young, I knew nothing, and I mean nothing, about money.  Somehow this lack of knowledge, this lack of awareness extended into almost everything in my life it seems. 

I had somehow grown up very naïve about the way the world actually worked.  I just didn’t get it.  Yes, I worked a job in high school, but I don’t remember if I actually needed to use my money for anything.  I certainly don’t remember saving it.  What I do remember is that I went off to college with no responsibility, no perspective and no money knowledge.

I was essentially a spoiled brat.  Or maybe an ignorant spoiled brat.  Or perhaps not a brat, but just a naïve and ignorant girl.

My parents paid for my college, gave me a car to drive and paid for all of my expenses (and then some).  I am not proud of this and I’m even downright embarrassed about some of my actions during that time.  I like to believe that if I had fully understood money and its ramifications, I would have made radically different choices.  But who knows? 

I remember being a young girl (maybe 9 or 10 years old), and seeing my dad in his study at his desk looking stressed.  I remember asking him if he was ok.  And while I don’t remember what he actually responded with, I do remember that I never felt like he actually was ok.  I remember stacks of receipts, and I remember ledgers and bills, and I remember worrying if we had enough money, but I didn’t ask, and nobody told me.

During college, I had everything paid for, and I took advantage of that.  I was always a bit socially awkward so when given the opportunity to pay for food or snacks for a bunch of my friends I would do so, in an attempt to buy friendship with my “generosity” (I put this in quotes because it was not even my money to be generous with).  I definitely wanted to be the hero.  Or maybe I just wanted a bit of popularity, which I had never really had at all.  And let me tell you, buying people things certainly has the potential to make you quite popular amongst your poor college student friends. 

I also wasted a ton of my parent’s money on car expenses.  I did have a car at college (a 1985 red Camaro) that I drove into the ground – not on purpose, mind you, but I absolutely destroyed that car.  In a nutshell I did that by not maintaining it (oil change, anyone?) and wrecking it in the snow and then not getting the damage checked out.  These two things sealed the deal on this car’s demise.  And could have led to my demise as well, as I was driving with a broken steering column for months and I got stranded oil-less on I-80 in Wyoming and had to hitchhike out.  Luckily for me, I was able to turn down the numerous scary-looking people in scary-looking cars that stopped to pick me up and I was able to flag down a large bus on that interstate.  I did get a ride with them, but not without receiving an extreme tongue-lashing from the angry driver for doing such a stupid, dangerous thing as flagging down a bus on the interstate.  This was before cell phones even existed at all, and I still believe that flagging down that bus was FAR safer than taking any of the rides that came along that day.  All of this to say I was unknowingly careless with my parent’s money.  I honestly thought that money was an unlimited resource, if I even thought about it at all.

My parents had given me plenty of warning that I would be financially on my own once I graduated from college, which I did shortly after I turned 21, after 3.5 years at Colorado State University.

Not because of good planning, but only because of good fortune, I was able to get a fellowship to attend graduate school – in fact, I had my pick of several graduate programs and did not have to pay anything for any of them, something else I took completely for granted.  This would be the first time I would be on my own or even considering the idea of being on my own.  I can honestly say that I had given absolutely no thought to how I would make this shift into supporting myself.  No planning, no preparation.  I suddenly had to pay rent, living expenses, car expenses, etc. 

I had nobody to blame but myself, as I had certainly received advance notice of this, but regardless, I suddenly found myself in the deep end of the pool, floundering around, doggy-paddling for my life.  This would go on for several years. 

The apartment that I ended up renting in State College, PA where I would be going to school at Penn State was a beautiful one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment in a golf course community surrounded by trees and walking trails – arguably a luxurious choice for a barely 21-year-old graduate student on her own for the first time. 

Even as I write this today, I don’t have an awareness of how I actually paid the rent.  Somehow I did, though.  I was driving a new car that my parents had just bought for me and trying to figure out how to feed myself, how to pay my bills, how to make new friends and whether I liked my chosen course of study. 

I don’t have a very nuanced or specific memory of those days, but I do remember asking my parents how to go about paying for things. They told me that I should get any loan that I could and apply for any credit card that I could.  I took this advice deeply to heart.  I got credit cards and loans and spent far too much money – on credit.

I remember one day during graduate school waking up and deciding I wanted a new stereo system for my apartment.  So, I drove out to an electronics store and bought one for $3,000 on credit.  A $3,000 stereo in 1991 was quite expensive, and certainly was not something that I needed to buy.  But buy it, I did.  And I don’t remember having any buyer’s remorse, I seem to recall having no regrets.  When I wanted to travel, I travelled – I put it on credit.  When I wanted to buy new clothes, I bought new clothes – I put those on credit.  When I wanted to buy a round of drinks for my friends, I did – I put it on credit.  The sky was the limit, or rather the credit card limits were the limits and I approached each one. 

When I graduated 2 years later with a master’s degree, I was approaching $30,000 in credit card debt.  For reference, in 2024 dollars, that is about $65,000 in debt on CREDIT CARDS!  What that means is that I was paying a ridiculous amount of interest annually on this debt. 

Now, you might be wondering how I ended up as a 23-year-old with that high of a credit limit.  Great question –I cannot answer that.  My best guess is that they kept upping my limits because I didn’t miss any minimum payments. 

Fortunately, I got two job offers right out of school.  But unfortunately, both job offers were for $29,000 a year – less than what I owed on my credit cards. 

I also ended up needing to travel for my first job, which required me spending my own money and then getting reimbursed a few weeks later.  Because I was still in the mindset that money spent on a credit card was just free money.  I remember charging all of my travel expenses on a card, submitting the reimbursable, getting reimbursed and then spending that money, feeling like I had just won a small lottery.  It never occurred to me to actually use that money to pay toward the credit card balance.

I had no vision for the future or how I might pay this off or even the thought that I ever would pay it off.  The thought never even seemed to cross my mind.

Until it did.

What it took for me to switch it up

I don’t know what actually happened to wake me up to the way that I was living.  One could argue that my prefrontal cortex finally developed fully.  Or maybe it was something I heard on the radio or something I read in a book.  Or perhaps it was a casual comment from a friend that I seemed to be able to buy more than everyone else.  Whatever it was that started my mindset shift, it did finally happen. 

At first it crept into my brain as a niggling doubt that I was doing this whole thing wrong.

Slowly it started to dawn on me that I might be in a bit of trouble. 

I suddenly realized that I would never actually get out of debt if I continued to only pay the minimum on my credit cards. 

I realized that if I kept spending at the rate I was spending, I would be in so much debt that it might actually smother me.

Having this realization was both a great and a terrifying epiphany all at once.  Having this sudden awareness was deeply uncomfortable and disorienting.  In fact, I can still feel the panic well up in my throat and stomach now even as I remember those first few months of awareness. 

How was I going to dig myself out of this debt?  Could I even do it?  Was it possible?

It might have been tempting at this point to look for somebody outside of myself to blame, and I probably did, but the fact of the matter is that I made those purchases, and now I would have to pay them off.  Regardless of whom I found to blame, I had to take this responsibility now.  Assigning blame wouldn’t be helpful and certainly wouldn’t get me out of debt.

Digging Out

Digging out of this deep, dark debt hole would require both the physical act of making payments and a huge mindset shift, or perhaps multiple mindset shifts. 

For the physical act of paying off the debt, I had luckily just been introduced to Microsoft Excel at my work.  As I played around with it, I realized the potential power this program had to help me with my goal of getting out of debt.

The first thing I did was to make a list of all of my loans and credit card balances so that I knew exactly what I was facing.  This was incredibly sobering.

I then documented my minimum balances and the interest rate for each card.

I documented what I was making every month.

I researched loan consolidation.

I called each credit card company and asked them what options I had for lower interest rates.  Sometimes that actually worked!

I got creative and started applying for credit cards with introductory rates and transferring balances to those cards, getting a temporary reprieve from the interest.

I set an intention to pay off the debt, with the first goal being to not amass any further debt.  I put myself on a spending budget.  This was difficult in and of itself for a person used to buying anything and everything.  (Cue the aforementioned mindset shifts.  W’ell get there.)

Because I knew that this was going to take me a very long time to pay down the huge balance, I decided to give myself a fairly generous spending budget, all things considered.  I scheduled vacations; I scheduled treats – making my budget sufficiently comfortable to be sustainable over the long term and I mean, the very long term.  I intrinsically knew that if I went too hard at paying off these debts, I would likely lose my momentum before I had achieved the goal.

With my first goal being not to amass further debt, my second goal became to pay off one single card.  I paid all of my minimum balances on all the cards, but any extra money I could put toward paying this debt down, I used to pay down the card with the lowest balance.

Once I paid that lowest card off, then I moved the entire amount that I was using to pay off that balance, and I put it toward what was now the lowest credit card balance. 

I called this the snowball effect.  As my cards got paid off, the other cards seemed to be easier to conquer. 

In the background, I was also now living without the aid of credit, so a lot had changed in my life.

Notably, I did get married during this process, so my story does turn from “I” to “we”.  Having a partner admittedly did help the process, but neither of us made a lot of money.  And I fully believe that I would have been able to pay off that debt without the pooling of resources, even if it had taken me a bit longer to do it.  If we hadn’t been living together I could have found a roommate to share expenses, enabling me to pay off the debt at close to the same rate.

By deciding not to continue spending on credit at all and to use a bit of extra money to start paying balances down, I was able to pay off all of my credit card debt over the course of the next 6 years.  It felt like an eternity at the time, and we had to make many sacrifices in order to do this. 

For example, we had to stay in a townhouse rather than purchase a freestanding house.  We had to limit the vacations we could take.  We couldn’t do or buy what our friends were doing and buying.  The sacrifices were worth it, though, knowing that it would be worth having the peace of mind.  I had dug myself into this hole and I had to dig myself out. 

Maintenance

After the debt was paid off, my partner and I still weren’t making much money and I had made the decision to stay home with our children when they were born. So, the challenge continued.  The new challenge, though, was maintenance of our new debt-free status.  We did allow ourselves debt for car loans (used car loans, mind you) and a mortgage.  We did not allow carrying over any credit card balance at all from month-to-month.  We did continue using credit cards, but only spent what we could afford to pay off at the end of the month. 

Because we set as our primary goal staying out of debt and living within our means, I experimented with a number of mechanisms that would enable us to do that.   This is a much longer part of the story and one that I will share on my site as a free resource to help others that might be in the position that I was once in.

All of this, though is the practical side of my attempt to live within my means, and there was a lot of work to be done on shifting my mindset in order to be able to do this.  So, let’s turn to that.

Assumptions I had to change

Making this shift from overspending to living within my means required me to shift quite a few beliefs. 

Delayed Gratification

The first thing that had to change was my values.  Whereas prior to this shift, one of my values had obviously been that I needed to have whatever I wanted in the moment that I wanted it, I now had to reorganize these values so that living within my means became more important to me than having what I wanted. 

So I had to learn delayed gratification.  This was a pretty new concept to me, and I went about doing this by making lists of things that I had the urge to buy.  I would periodically (or rather, daily) review the list so that I could cross things off that I no longer wanted – believe it or not, sometimes things actually would drop off this list.  If the wanted item was still on my list after 30 days I would allow myself to make a plan to purchase it (if it was a reasonably priced item). 

This shift in values was pretty painful, but the pain that I had experienced from being in so much crippling debt made this change worthwhile for me.  When I would feel pain about sacrificing my want, I would remember the even greater pain I experienced by living in debt and that motivated me to stay on this path.

Buying Used

The next belief I had to shift was my thought that I had to buy new things.  This applied to cars, houses, clothing, household items, etc.  Up to this point, I had believed that buying used decreased my own worth, my own value.  I believed that I deserved the best, the newest, the top-of-the-line.  But my pain of being in debt motivated me to shift this belief.  I began to experiment with what it felt like to find a great deal on something used.  I still struggled with feeling dirty when buying used.  But when I started experimenting this way, I found that there was a whole other world out there – made up of people who valued frugality as a way of life.  I found that while I no longer fit in with the people in my life that looked down on buying used, I fit in more with this new group of people that actually admired it. 

Embracing Limits (or Learning to Not Fear Them)

Another belief that I had to begin working on was my belief that boundaries (I like to call them limits) were bad.   This shift would prove to be the most difficult one for me.  In order to stay out of debt, it is imperative that you be able to set limits on what you say yes to and what you say no to.  This creates a whole dynamic of learning to say no even when you are afraid that doing so will cost you something that you think you need to survive.  In my case, this fear was loss of connection.  I feared loss of connection more than many, and one of my ways of connecting with people had been to buy them things. 

So I needed to shift the stories I told myself that generosity was the best way to make friends.  This was a tough one, and I LOVED being generous, but I had to start saying no to others in order to say yes to myself.  I also had to find other ways to connect with people rather than to just keep buying them things.

What had to happen was that my determination to stay out of debt had to exceed my fear of losing connection.  And it now did. 

When I really examined my belief that I needed to overspend, or even just spend at all, on people in order to maintain connection with them, I found the correlation to actually be pretty weak.  It turns out that my fear of losing connection never was really as tied to money as I had thought or feared it might be.  Who would have known?  It took this experiment for me to discover that my fears wouldn’t always come true.

Insecurity

Another belief that was baked into my money troubles was that I could buy my way into feeling better about myself. I didn’t often like the way I looked, so I was always looking for the external clothing item that might make me look or feel better about myself.  These items cost money – I would typically have the urge to go shopping when I was feeling particularly downtrodden or insecure, which was often.  This was simply an attempt to soothe myself and it didn’t always work.  Now that I was choosing to not do so much shopping (I still did do it at times), I had to take the chance of feeling insecure.  But I realized that buying all of the clothes hadn’t really made me feel better in any substantial way.  So I made the choice that not being in debt was more important to me than trying to feel better by buying things. 

Yes, this is a story of digging out of debt, but like most things, it’s bigger than that.  This is a story of learning to see through all of the beliefs and assumptions and stories I took on that led to my overspending. 

What I would tell a younger version of me

So what would I tell a younger version of me?  To be honest, there are so many versions of me I would like to visit. 

I guess I would start with a fairly young version of myself – the version of me that was worried about her dad when he was sitting at his desk.  I would tell that girl to trust her instincts.  I would tell her that she would be ok, and that her parents would be ok.  I would tell her to start learning what she could about money but not to fear it.  I would also like her to know that she was not alone and that she was not responsible for other people’s stresses, that it was ok to worry about herself.

Then I would pop over to the 21-year-old me.  Most of all, I would want her to know that she is ok just as she is.  That she doesn’t need to try and buy connection or try and buy beauty or try and buy happiness or peace or the myriad other things she was after.  I would tell her how amazing and loveable she is just as she is.  I would also tell this 21-year-old me to trust her instincts, to not try to take on responsibility for those around her, and to trust that the right people will love her without her having to impress them in any way.  I would want her to know that with the wrong people, she would be unable to get it right and with the right people, she would be unable to get it wrong. 

Next I would visit 30-year-old me, I would want her to know how proud I was of her for figuring it out and digging out.  But I would also want her to know that she was ok and that she didn’t have to live in fear in order to not fall back into debt.  I would want her to also trust herself and her instincts and to realize the depth of her resilience.  I would encourage her to see beyond the fear and to love and cherish herself deeply.

I could likely go on and on and on about the messages I would like to tell a younger me, but I will stop there. 

And, I might add that I would like for all of the people reading or listening to this to know this:  These messages are true for you.  You are ok, trust your instincts, ditch the fear, cherish yourself, and with the wrong people, you will be unable to get it right and with the right people, you will be unable to get it wrong. 

If you would like help with getting out of debt, please reach out to me.  www.caryrinken.com