Welcome to an editorial blog article by Caitlin—the auDHD, OCD, C-PTSD marketing lead for Tree City Tax. My brain is broken, but I am not. And we’re gonna talk about debt today.
I’ve had quite an on-again, off-again relationship with my credit score throughout my adulthood. During my Dave Ramsey phase, I closed all of my credit card accounts and took the hit to my credit, with the intention of becoming entirely debt free and no longer having a credit score at all. I would be a cash-only kind of gal.
I started my Ramsey journey in mid-2012, after starting my first full-time job and getting my own apartment for the first time in my life. My first goal was to pay off my 2008 Honda Fit, which was much easier to do with a full-time salary than it had been when I was living with my parents, working a part-time temp job, and putting Egg McMuffins on my Discover card because my food stamps ran out.
Ramsey promotes a completely debt and credit-free lifestyle, often repeating a line from the Bible, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” He loves to layer on the evangelical guilt trips, which are the worst kind of catnip for my obsessive-compulsive brain.
I took his rules to heart and felt deep shame every time I strayed from his teachings.
Every time I felt ease, I felt guilt. Every time I felt pleasure, I felt guilt. I was supposed to be suffering in self-imposed poverty so that every possible dollar went toward fixing my money mistakes. Enjoying my life while I did so was not something I was allowed to do. I became smaller and smaller, unwilling to participate in life because of the shame of falling for the credit game.
Like the other 90% of Americans who have debt.
It is far, far rarer to be debt-free than to have debt. Debt is normal. What’s more—debt is neutral.
Debt doesn’t say anything about your worthiness as a human being on planet Earth. Debt doesn’t say anything about your relationships or your trustworthiness. Your credit score is not more important than your actions and beliefs.
I am not that special.
I’m not the one special flower who has to be debt free to deserve nice things. Not even nice things—I wasn’t allowing myself to deserve things at all, beyond the barest necessities. I became a minimalist, selling off extraneous belongings and furniture, only purchasing what I needed, prioritizing secondhand shopping and almost never buying new.
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” was my mantra.
I have made money mistakes. I have also made good money decisions. And the most important thing I’ve come to realize is that my financial circumstances don’t have any bearing on who I am as a person.
Slowly, over a decade and a half since starting on this money journey, I am emerging from the deep pit of shame and realizing that credit cards don’t make me bad, or stupid, or morally unclean. I allow my life to be about more than just paying bills. I allow myself to want, even if I don’t fulfill every whim and desire.
It is still difficult. I am at war with my own mind, most of the time, and it’s exhausting.
Every time I buy something I don’t strictly need, I panic. I’m worried that I will end up in a financial emergency and I’ll have no one to blame but myself, because I got pink highlights in my hair and bought new bras.
In a cruel twist of psychology, in fact, the only way for me to learn that it’s safe to spend money on myself is to keep doing it, feeling the fear and shame, and regulating my nervous system until it learns that spending money isn’t dangerous.
One thing I want you to know about our business at Tree City Tax: We will never shame you. You can bring us years of backlogged notices from the IRS and a shoebox full of crumpled receipts and we will help you make sense of it.
Money is hard enough without shame.