Illustration by Tim Bower

My big, fat, unpaid credit card bill

When the statements piled up and the creditors started calling, I had to do the unthinkable -- confront my mounting debt.

By Sarah Hepola

Read more: Budget, Life, Sarah Hepola

Jan. 30, 2008 | It was December of last year, a few weeks before Christmas, and I was buying a present at Barnes & Noble.

"Do you have another credit card?" asked the salesman. "This one doesn't want to go through."

How gracious of him to make it sound like the credit card's fault. That credit card was such a coward, always chickening out in the face of a crucial transaction. Unfortunately, I did not have another credit card. Well, actually, I had three, but experience had proved they didn't want to go through, either.

There was a time when this exchange would have flustered me, left me stammering excuses about how the card had just worked, and I couldn't imagine what was wrong. But by late December, I had grown so accustomed to this awkward scenario that I wasn't even all that embarrassed. It was as if I had presented him with a lottery ticket and, failing to win big, went back to the original game plan.

"Just take this." I handed him one of my few remaining 20s. I was, officially, broke.

I was so broke, in fact, that I actually had no idea how broke I was. The exact number had become a mystery, something hidden (or, rather, stuffed) in the closet: I didn't know how much I owed on those credit cards, or how much was in my bank account, or whether that balance -- were I to check it online, which I did not do that month -- would be positive or negative. I knew I owed several thousand. Five freaking digits. The evidence sat in a neat stack of unopened credit card bills, which had been piling up next to the French press since October. The evidence came in the form of phone calls from bill collectors, from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., calls that I never answered.

If this sounds like breezy indifference, if it seems that I was not worried, then good; I fooled you. I was desperately trying to pretend that my financial plight did not bother me. Who wants to confront such colossal failure? Besides, it was the holidays. Gifts and parties and free champagne. Every day the mail brought Christmas cards with pictures of friends' babies doing adorable, uncanny things. The mail also brought bills. The pictures went on the fridge. The bills? They went into the stack.

In my apartment, alone, I had fits of anxiety. Tears, clenched fists, the works. I lay bug-eyed at 4 a.m., wondering how I was going to get out of this mess. I needed more time. I needed more work.

What I needed was an ejector seat.

Most people get into catastrophic debt for one of two reasons -- job loss and medical crises -- but that was not my case at all. I was single with no kids, a lifestyle that had allowed me to spend late nights at the bar, to travel, even move to New York. But I sometimes worried that living so free of responsibility for so long had left me a bit reluctant to grow up -- to sacrifice immediate gratification for future stability, to acknowledge the simple confines of my bank account. I didn't have savings. I let bills slip. For two years, I lived with no health insurance and my fingers crossed. I couldn't escape the feeling that I was making messes for someone else to clean up. I couldn't escape the feeling that, at 33, I had failed to become an adult.

One morning, I sat down at the kitchen table, armed with a strong cup of coffee, the stack of bills and a printout from Oprah's Debt Diet Web page: "How much debt do you really have?" it read. After 30 minutes, and a good deal of sighing, I had the answer: $10,710.

The number was ugly, but it wasn't what alarmed me. No, what alarmed me was the hideous charade of my minimum balance payments. All four of my maxed-out cards had risen to around a 30 percent APR, and I was getting walloped by late fees, over-limit fees and finance charges. Agh, the finance charges: I can't imagine the real cost of all the piddling purchases I'd made over the years; some Fatboy Slim record from 2000 probably cost me $250, which is $249 more than I should have paid for "Funk Soul Brother."

Mostly, it made me ill thinking how hard I had scrambled to make regular payments on those cards, just to keep them current. It was like throwing money into a fire. I was paying $500 a month for the mere privilege of running in place. And I'd been doing it for two years. (By the way, this amount didn't even include the thousands in back taxes I already owed to the federal government. Story for another time.) As I surveyed the damage, all I could think was: How did this happen?

Well, I mostly knew how this happened. I'm not the victim of identity theft. I'm the one who made all these charges. That $80 bar tab? Yeah, that's mine. When things got tight last summer -- checks weren't coming in on time, I wasn't getting enough work as a freelancer -- I knew leaning on my credit cards was a bad idea. I knew how evil they can be. So the question isn't, "How did this happen?" but rather: "How did I let it?" I could give you several excuses for that debacle last December -- I was living in the city with the highest cost of living! I was supporting myself as a writer! -- but none of them explains away the fact that I spent too much, and when I got in trouble, I closed my eyes, put my fingers in my ears, and went, "La-la-la."

I suppose part of me believed my situation wasn't all that bad. Most of my friends have credit card debt. Some of them have far more than I do. (And some of them have student loans, mortgages, car loans heaped on top of that.) We don't talk about that credit card debt -- even as our sex lives make for good cocktail conversation, financial instability still feels like an ugly taboo -- but there is a general, jokey acknowledgment that we're all slaves to our plastic.

Next page: I walked into that session a little bit helpless. But I left with a plan