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I am perpetually afraid to look at my bank account online. This is rather inconvenient when I need to write a check and instead of just casually writing it and being done, there is a lot of teeth grinding and eye twitching involved, which means that I spend a lot of my time looking pained and in stress.
Much like my relationships with most things, my relationship with money kind of ebbs and flows with our ups and downs. We were on a great upswing for a brief moment and now we’re in a bit of a rocky period. For someone who extols the virtues of personal finance and 401(K)s I probably should have a bit of a handle on these things, but every time I feel I’m keeping up with it all – especially as of late – past mistakes seem to rear their ugly heads. Even when cards have been paid off and the debt isn’t something all that serious, it all still makes me tense and want to just be done with it all.
I read this saying somewhere the other day about ‘nine months on, nine months off’ in regards to the gaining of pregnancy weight and then the subsequent losing of it. It didn’t take six weeks to gain it all to don’t expect to be Heidi Klum and have it go away in six weeks either leaving you with a body fit for a Victoria’s Secret catalogue. I had an Aha Moment right then, because that’s how it is with debt. It’s not like the debt and the bad credit and the ability to avoid saving like the plague just came out of nowhere. No, this is stupidity and ignorance that took years to master, leaving one – or me in this situation – in an oft precarious position. Even though I’ve gotten a raise, there is still past debt and then the subsequent things that happen. Like cars are not cheap to fix when the engine breaks or some jackass in a Murano slams into the front end.
What got me on this whole ‘debt trip’ wasn’t just the constant thinking of how I’m currently owed close to $2,000 and yet I have none of it and my credit card is screaming in pain, but because of Leah’s refreshingly honest and eloquent post about being in debt:
It’s expensive to not have enough money. If you have to make that payment so the electricity won’t get turned off and the bank allows it to go through, Thank God, but then charges you a fee for going under your actual balance, you just start accepting that it’s a part of the deal. You add an additional $30 dollars to anything going through that you figure the bank will cover, even though you know your don’t have that much. We got pretty good at identifying what the bank would accept and what they would turn away. Of course, you always run the risk of them turning everything away, which is within their right, and then you feel like an idiot and worse, have to pay additional fees if there was another bank involved and worst, let people down and tempt fraud charges if it happens too often.
The thing about being in debt is that it’s a very scary and lonely place even as the pressure slowly abates and progress is made. You don’t want to talk about it out of embarrassment and no one can really get you out of it. And though there is advice everywhere on the subject from how to tackle it by budgeting or how to control it via myth busting, it’s all far easier said than done. It’s a slow and excruciating process that’s much like watching hair grow or chipping away at an iceberg. Only in hindsight can I say “Oh, it wasn’t that bad” and then go on and wax poetic about it. But sitting here in this spot with the savings account and a considerably higher salary, doesn’t keep me from sitting here holding my breath while the Bank of America page loads only to find out that I do in fact have money in my account and I’m not going to starve to death this week; because that fear is still there.
