My Struggle with Debt Ends HERE
By: Hilary Annette
Tags: Millennials, Shopping Addiction, Spending, Debt, Paying Off Debt

My Struggle with Debt Ends HERE

This morning I began the audiobook The Spender’s Guide to Debt-Free Living by Anna Newell Jones, and it made me ask myself some tough questions like “what do I actually have to show for my debt?”. The answer, as you may well imagine, is underwhelming.

As a typical millennial who is up to my ears in credit card debt, I’ve always normalized debt and living paycheque to paycheque. I blamed everything and anything but myself. The economy. The Boomers. Even my employers for not just handing me a life-changing raise. The problem was always everything around me, but never me. Nevermind the fact that I treated myself to things that I couldn’t afford constantly — I deserved those things! Well buck up buttercup, deserve has nothing to do with it.

My name is Hilary, and I have a shopping addiction.

In The Spender’s Guide to Debt-Free Living, Anna Newell Jones promotes the year-long “spending fast” that helped her pay off nearly $24,000 in debt. This entails spending only on necessities for an entire year and saying no to everything “extra”. When I pictured myself debt-free, I immediately pictured all of the savings I’d have soon after paying everything off. And then I imagined spending those savings. See the problem here? It’s not that I don’t make enough money or that my living expenses are astronomically high, at the end of the day my problem is that I am just too. damn. materialistic. I love beautiful things. I live for gourmet food. I adore soft, luxurious textures. I am a sucker for pretty packaging, and an even bigger sucker for the ads that pop up on my social media that seem to know exactly what it is that I won’t be able to resist. But all of these things are nothing compared to the dopamine hit that I get when I make the purchase.

“Don’t confuse a shopping high with true happiness” — Anna Newell Jones

Sometimes when I’m feeling down, I will find myself looking for something — anything to buy to temporarily make myself feel better. When the initial high wears off and I start to feel that dreaded buyers remorse? Well that’s when I start texting my friends about the cute new <insert item I don’t need here> in order to get that validation and revisit the initial high. Spending has become pathological for me.

My solution? While I was tempted to follow a strict spending fast such as the one recommended by Anna Newell Jones, I quickly realized that I needed to fix the root of my problem. I needed to kill the materialistic, insecure, spending addict inside of me, or else I’d just fall right back into debt. So while I will be sticking as closely to the spending fast rules as possible, my journey will be mainly focused on learning to live with less. Not for a year. Not just until my debt is paid off. I want to live a life where I don’t have to spend all of my time in the pursuit of MORE. More money, more stuff. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s time to focus on people and experiences instead of inanimate objects that will never love me back.

This blog is a way for me to hold myself accountable. I am putting my debt out there for the world to see, and I am embarking on a journey to be completely debt free by January 2022. I am hoping that others out there who are struggling with the same issues will be inspired to take this journey with me. I will be posting several times per week to update you all on my progress — who’s with me?

Total debt as of November 16th, 2020: $18,013