NY Times, February 18, 2007
Debtors Search for Discipline via Blogs
By JOHN LELAND
When a woman who calls herself Tricia discovered
last week that she owed $22,302 on her credit
cards, she could not wait to spread the news.
Tricia, 29, does not talk to her family or
friends about her finances, and says she is ashamed of her personal debt.
Yet from the laundry room of her home in northern
Michigan, Tricia does something that would have
been unthinkable and impossible a generation
ago: she goes online and posts intimate details
of her financial life, including her net worth
(now negative $38,691), the balance and finance
charges on her credit cards, and the amount of
debt she has paid down since starting a blog
about her debt last year ($15,312).
Her journal, bloggingawaydebt .com, is one of
dozens that have sprung up in recent years taking
advantage of Internet anonymity to reveal to
strangers fiscal intimacies the authors might not tell their closest friends.
Like other debt bloggers, Tricia believes the
exposure gives her the discipline to reduce her
debt. I think about this blog every time Im in
the store and something that I dont need catches
my eye, she told readers last week. Look what you all have done to me!
A decade after the Internet became a public stage
for revelations from the bedroom, it is now
peering into the really private stuff: personal finance.
The blogs open a homey and sometimes shockingly
candid window on the day-to-day finances of
American households in a time of rising debt,
failing mortgages and financial uncertainty. In
2006, the average American household carried
about $7,200 in revolving debt (mostly on credit
cards) and $21,000 in total debt.
A blog called Poorer Than You
(kgazette.blogspot.com) describes the financial
doings of a 20-year-old film-school dropout.
(Typical post: Yesterday we ate lunch at Subway
for a total of $8.00, and went grocery shopping
... with a list! And didnt buy anything that
wasnt on it!) On saveleighann.blogspot.com,
Leigh Ann Fraley, 37, provides daily accounts of
her escape from $19,947 in credit card debt.
I teach people how to get out of debt for a
living, but I couldnt do it myself until I
started the blog, said Ms. Fraley, who conducts
seminars in personal finance for a bank in
Northern California. I started to write
everything down, like, I saved 20 cents today by
parking at a meter that still had time on it. I
tell things I wouldnt tell my family. When she
got out of debt in December, she said, The blog was the first people I told.
A Boston couple who call themselves the King and
Queen of Debt started their his-and-hers blog,
Were in Debt (wereindebt.com), last March as a
way to talk to each other about their debt. They
owed $34,155.70 on their credit cards at the
time, and an additional $120,000, mostly in student loans.
My wife and I have good communication skills in
every avenue of life except finances, said the
King of Debt, insisting on anonymity because, he
said, We dont want our parents to find out and kill us.
Starting the blog, he said, was a way to communicate.
Tricia started her blog after reading the online
account of another woman,
thedebtdefier.blogspot.com, who said she had paid
off her credit card debt of $19,794.23 in a little more than a year.
Like other bloggers interviewed for this article,
Tricia said she and her husband had arrived at
their debt gradually, not by big financial crises
but by regularly spending more money than they
made, using credit that was offered freely by credit card companies.
It was nothing over the top, said a Georgia
blogger who calls himself N.C.N., for No Credit
Needed, describing how his credit card balance reached $11,510.22.
Just pretty much what everyone I know does and
continues to do, N.C.N. said. Every month Id
say, Were going to pay off this credit card
completely. Then Id say, O.K., just this month
well let it slide. Then you wake up and you
have $5,000 on your credit card. He says on his
blogs (ncnblog.com and ncnnetwork.com) that he
has no debt now and no credit cards. Like other
blogs, his sites run advertisements for
debt-reduction services, and N.C.N. says he makes a small profit.
Tricia said her credit problems began in her
freshman year at Michigan Technological
University, when she opened a Visa account in
return for the campus signup premium, a large
candy bar. Since then, she said, she has rarely
made more than minimum payments. As credit card
companies offered her more cards and deeper
credit lines, she said she kept her balance close
to the maximum, eventually topping $37,000. Even
as her credit card debt surpassed her annual
income, she assumed that someday she would make more money and pay it off.
She said she never discussed her debt with family
or friends. You dont want them to know, she
said. Our parents hope for the best for us, and
its hard to let them know were struggling. And
with friends, you dont want them to think less
of you. And when you go out with friends you
dont want to say, Oh, I cant do that, I dont have the money.
Keeping the blog, she said, has made her
conscious of her spending. Though most of her
readers are strangers, she worries about letting them down.
I know that if I use my credit card, Ill have
to go on there and say I used it. Ill have to
fess up. Ive been wanting one of those L.C.D.
TVs for quite a while now, but every time I see
them, I think about having to come on the blog
and say I bought it. Because we dont need it, we
have a TV, but its still a temptation thats
there. And Im sure if I wasnt blogging wed already have it.
For the engaged couple who say they are behind a
blog called Make Love, Not Debt
(makelovenotdebt.com; net worth: negative
$70,787.94), the feedback from readers has not
always been gentle. People have very strong
feelings about debt, said the blogs female
half, who calls herself Her. People were
appalled by my spending, like buying a $500 pair of shoes.
Just having the amount of debt we have is
offensive to a lot of people, said Him, the
blogs other half. People will levy personal
attacks for mistakes we acknowledge. We dont think thats quite necessary.
When they discussed wanting a $25,000 wedding,
one reader scolded them: Grow up, a wedding
isnt about how much debt you put yourself or
your parents into. If you are worried about that,
in my opinion, you are not ready for marriage.
Tricia said the comments she had gotten had been
overwhelmingly supportive. But she acknowledges
that the fear of censure can be useful as well.
I feel embarrassed about it, she said of her
debt. I try not to, though. I try to put a spin
on it when I start to get too down. I think to
myself if we didnt get in this mess and get out
of it, we wouldve just kept going the way we
were. But now we have health insurance, were
saving for retirement. We couldve just been
living on the edge, but not underneath.
