Her Job: Novelist, journalist, and part-time copywriter.
Her Home: A 3-bedroom co-op in a nice area in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband and two small children.
Her background: Born and raised in Ohio.
She earns: She and her husband take home about $140,000 a year.
She used to spend: Umm… she's not quite sure.
Her problem: Debtors Anonymous helped her control her spending; now she needs help with her money.
Anna faces her debts — and her denial.
Award-winning novelist, successful journalist, down-to-earth Mom — you wouldn't expect Anna to be so vague about dollars and cents. Ask her about literature or politics (or teething babies) and she could talk for hours; ask her if she has a fixed or an adjustable rate on her co-op mortgage and she'll murmur, "Let me get back to you on that one…"
Step 1: Identifying the problem
Anna may not be able to spell out every detail of her family's financial situation, but she can definitely identify what her problem was. "I've never been wildly profligate in a spending way," Anna says, "but if I needed something or felt I wanted it, I would buy it, whether we had the money or not."
Anna's "friendly" checking account wasn't helping matters: If there was no money on deposit, the bank would simply "loan" it to her, right there at the ATM machine - at 18.90% interest. Anna came to rely on these impromptu loans and, over time, withdrew around forty or fifty thousand dollars this way. "That's a total guess," she says. "My husband and I would run up the account, say 'oh this is terrible,' and pay it off — but then start living beyond our means again."
Eventually her problems with money started to affect her marriage. "We had a real 'Ricky and Lucy' thing going for a while," she says. "My husband would do all the banking and pay the bills, but he'd often pay them late and we'd have to do a lot of juggling. He'd ask, 'What did you spend this money on?' And I never knew — even if it was just groceries I was buying, I couldn't account for it."
After finishing the novel she'd been working on, Anna took a moment to inspect the family finances. "I realized we had no money in the bank! This made absolutely no sense to me. My husband was working hard; in fact he had just started a new job with a higher salary." Anna's family had to survive on checking overdrafts for the next two weeks.
Step 2: Seeking help
With the reality of her "vagueness" problem hitting home, Anna decided the time had come to get her act together. She visited a certified financial planner, who helped her and her husband to open a Schwab account and write a will. ("Other than that," says Anna, "nothing changed.")
Then she read How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt and Live Prosperously by Jerrold Mundis — a book espousing the principles of Debtors Anonymous. This national group was founded by Alcoholics Anonymous members who had gotten sober, realized they were having trouble with their money, and decided to apply the same principles to "debt addiction."
"That's when I said, 'I'm going to do whatever the DA people say I need to do'... And things started to get better remarkably quickly."
What she found herself joining was a program modeled directly on AA. "Put the word debt wherever you hear the word alcohol, and solvency for sobriety, and you get the picture," says Anna. "It's strict in some ways — they ask you to keep a very careful spending plan and not to take on any more credit card debt."
Step 3: Surrender
The first two steps in DA are the big ones: you admit you are powerless over your addiction to debt, and concede the need for a power greater than yourself to move you on the path to solvency. "It sometimes feels like they're verging on overkill with the spiritual approach. But even if I don't fully understand it, if I only do what is proscribed, it seems to work... I'm not trying to figure out where my problem comes from anymore, I'm just trying to behave differently."
"I'm actually running our domestic budget now. I'm making a real effort to pay the bills on time, I'm laying money aside to pay taxes — I never used to even consider doing that. I'm not charging stuff and I'm not increasing our debt, either— I would say I'm still struggling with all of this. But I'm improving, so I should take credit for that, I guess... I guess I should."
Dealing with complicated emotions can be an important step in getting a financial life - but at some point everyone can also use some practical advice.
See what Beth suggests for Anna and her family.
How do you know if you're a compulsive debtor?
Debtors Anonymous created fifteen questions to help people find out if they have a problem with debt. Here are five of them.
- Are your debts making your home life unhappy
- Do your debts cause you to think less of yourself?
- Have you ever made unrealistic promises to your creditors?
- Do you ever fear that your employer, family or friends will learn the extent of your total indebtedness?
- Does the pressure of your debts cause you to have difficulty in sleeping?
… read more about Debtors Anonymous and get the full list at DebtorsAnonymous.org