Marrying Debt

This post has been a long time coming. Yesterday morning Shiner e-mailed me to tell me that he'd just sent his stimulus check to his American Express, and that the balance on that card was now below $7,500. To understand how huge this is, I need to give you a little background.

Back before we decided to get married, I knew Shiner had credit card debt. He knew that I had none. From what he said about it, I guessed he had about $10,000 in debt--not a small amount, but not paralyzing. I knew he was sending payments beyond his minimums to try to pay it down. He knew it was important to me that he was doing that. And I trusted that he had it pretty well in hand.

So we decided to get married. And it was great. We didn't tell our parents or our friends right away, we just kept it to ourselves for a little bit, and savored the fact that we had this exciting, fantastic secret. And then we decided to pay for the wedding ourselves, so we start talking about possible dates and budgets and how much we could save each month and how all those pieces fit together. How about Fall 2008? Yes, Fall of 2008 would be lovely. I've always had a thing for fall, anyway.

And I told him I really wanted his credit card debt gone by the time we got married, that I thought he can do it, and we should account for that in setting realistic saving targets. OK, he said.

Except when he added up his credit card debt, it was nearly $42,000.

I needed it to sink in, too. $42,000.

He'd never done the math before. That was more than his annual gross salary. I was aghast. I felt blindsided. I felt pissed off. I told him we couldn't set a date. I couldn't set a date. I grew up in a fantastically debt-averse household. I am a debt Puritan. I couldn't live the way he'd been living for the past few years. Whether he realized it or not, he'd gone off the deep end and I wasn't going to legally hitch my wagon to his until he'd come back from the precipice, and until I trusted that he would not inch back up on it again after we got married. It felt like financial infidelity, even though his accounts were all still his and my accounts were all still mine. It wasn't as though he'd been deliberately deceiving me, that was just a side effect of having been deceiving himself. I still loved him, still wanted to marry him, but all of a sudden I didn't feel like I could trust him not to drag me into a hole with him. And that lack of trust is a pretty good sign that we shouldn't get married quite yet.

So then all of a sudden we weren't getting married. Not in the foreseeable future, anyway. Certainly not by Fall 2008. Maybe not for a couple of years. Who knows? If he wasn't able or--more scary, willing--to rejigger his financial life, maybe never. It was so awful. I remember very little of the specifics because I basically zoned out of my life. I took at least two mental health days, days when I just couldn't drag myself to work. I think Shiner felt even worse, though. He was like the walking dead. Remember, we still hadn't told our families or our friends, so neither of us had anyone we felt comfortable talking to about the situation. I alternated between wanting to comfort him and resenting that he'd been such a bonehead about it in the first place. The guy went to school for accounting! How could he not get that he was spending way more money than he had? Did he not care?

Not setting a date was tough on me, but it was killing Shiner. God love him, while I was being a logical, self-preserving hardass, he just wanted to get maaaarriiiied. A couple of days after the big reveal, he came up with a plan, hoping to get me confident enough in him and his financial committment to set a date. His plan basically involved spending nothing, cashing in all of his investments, getting a second job, opening a couple of zero-percent balance transfer cards, and working like a damn dog to pay off his two high-interest, high-balance cards by the end of 2008 so we could get married in January 2009. It was going to be tight, but it was theoretically possible.

We made some tweaks (I wasn't about to let him cash out the tiny amount he had in his retirement account for my benefit--not when the whole point was for us to be old and doddering together), and he went into action. I stayed anxious, but was slightly optimistic. I could tell his heart was in the right place, but I was worried about his follow through. I decided I was OK with setting a date and making some plans, but I was also only putting down deposits I was willing to forfeit if Shiner didn't follow through and I had to call the whole thing off. I knew he wouldn't be able to pay everything off by the time we got married. That was, and is, simply too steep a hil for such a short period of time. But if he could pay off the two high-interest cards, he'd owe a third of what he started out with and would have worked his ass off in the process. I don't need perfection. Working his ass off was good enough to prove to me that he knew it was serious. We could tackled the rest together.

Shiner has been too embarassed for me to blog about this before, and I have respected that. But I think he's surprised himself with the numbers, and is so proud of himself he's told me I can blog about his debt now. I think he wants me to blog about it.

So what's the status update? Shiner has:

paid off the Chase (at 29.78%!!!!) with his second balance transfer, back in early December.

knocked down the Am Ex balance to $7,453 (at 15.98%)

a $5,248 balance on his Citi card, on a 0% offer that expires in October '09

a $7,064 balance on his Discover card, on a 0% offer. He can keep that 0% rate indefinitely so long as he makes two purchases a month at the normal interest rate, so he's been buying two packs of gum per month to minimize the interest charges

...for a total credit card debt of $19,765.

Compared with his original balance of $41,935, that is phenomenal progress--a 53% reduction in less than six months! In a follow-up post I'll describe how he's done it and how the realization that I am "marrying debt" has affected my approach to money, debt, and us.