I’ve been a terrible money manager over the years, but it never occurred to me to consider that I might be a compulsive spender until recently. I found a really cool podcast called “I Can’t Stop Spending! A Podcast about Recovery from Compulsive Spending, Shopping, and Debting” by Susan B. So far, I’ve listened to the first 14 episodes out of the total 54 podcasts available. Susan B. is a pseudonym adopted by the podcaster. She describes herself as a “financial sobriety evangelist.” She is feisty, fun, and brutally honest about her struggles with her spending addiction. I just love her!
One of the things that she talked about in the first podcast episode was vagueness about money. Here’s what she said: “My disease is a disease of vagueness. I came in, like, ‘I, I don’t know how much I spend on this, that, I don’t know, I don’t know how much I spend on anything.’ I didn’t want to know. You know, the disease likes it that way. Let’s just keep you all vague, and… I don’t even know how much my debt is, I don’t know how much my bills are. I might have had a drawer full of bills shoved in there, I didn’t even want to look at. But, recovery, whether in or out of a 12-step program has to start with coming into the light out of the darkness. It just does.”
So much of that really resonated with me! I don’t believe that I am a true compulsive spender as it is strictly defined. But I do think the “disease of vagueness” has had a hold of me more often than not over the years. I’ve blamed it on my ADHD (my inability to stay focused, my distractibility, my lack of attention to detail, my boredom with anything structured or proscribed). Sometimes I’ve also blamed my husband, although that’s not fair. Ultimately, the real culprit has always been myself and my unwillingness to face the hard stuff. I’ve gone months without reconciling my bank account. I’ve used a credit card for routine purchases like groceries or gasoline, because I was afraid I might not have enough left in my checking account. I’ve procrastinated sorting out unpaid bills for months until bills I have money to pay for have gone to collections. I’m ashamed of this. I feel awful about it. Yet, the disease of vagueness has had me in its grip. I don’t want to know.
I’ve been working on it though. Right around the time I started my blog two years ago, I also set up a spreadsheet to track my spending and a series of linked spreadsheets to track debt by account and in total. I was horrified to find that we had over $51,000 in debt, not including our mortgage. Like my blogging though, my attempts at money management have been inconsistent. After a year, we had reduced our debt by $9,000. In the second year, we increased our debt by $3,000. That’s discouraging.
But listening to Susan B. has reinforced my resolve to stay out of vagueness and come into the light when it comes to dealing with our money. We are, despite some set-backs, in better shape financially than we were two years ago. We’ve reduced our debt by $6,000 instead of not reducing it at all or increasing it during the first year and instead of increasing quite a lot it a lot more than we actually did during the second year. Now, using a debt snowball, we think we can realistically pay off the rest of our debt (about $45,000) within 2 more years. It’s a lot more than we paid over the last two years, so it will take a lot of light! Say good bye to financial vagueness!