Debtors search for discipline through blogs
People sharing personal finance secrets online.
By John Leland
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/nation/02/18/18debt
blogging.html


When a woman who calls herself Tricia discovered last week that she
owed $22,302 on her credit cards, she could not wait to spread the
news. Tricia, 29, does not talk to her family or friends about her
finances and says she is ashamed of her personal debt.

Yet from the laundry room of her home in northern Michigan, Tricia
does something that would have been unthinkable — and impossible — a
generation ago: She goes online and posts intimate details of her
financial life, including her net worth (now negative $38,691), the
balance and finance charges on her credit cards, and the amount of
debt she has paid down since starting a blog about her debt last year
($15,312).

Her journal, bloggingaway debt.com, is one of dozens that have sprung
up taking advantage of Internet anonymity to reveal to strangers
fiscal intimacies the authors might not tell their closest friends.

Like other debt bloggers, Tricia thinks the exposure gives her the
discipline to reduce her debt.

"I think about this blog every time I'm in the store and something
that I don't need catches my eye," she told readers last week. "Look
what you all have done to me!"

A decade after the Internet became a public stage for revelations
from the bedroom, it is now peering into the really private stuff:
personal finance.

The blogs open a window on the finances of American households in a
time of rising debt, failing mortgages and financial uncertainty. In
2006, the average American household carried about $7,200 in
revolving debt (mostly on credit cards) and $21,000 in total debt.

A blog called "Poorer Than You" (kgazette.blogspot.com) describes the
financial doings of a 20-year-old film-school dropout. (Typical
post: "Yesterday we ate lunch at Subway for a total of $8.00, and
went grocery shopping with a list! And didn't buy anything that
wasn't on it!") On saveleighann.blogspot.com, Leigh Ann Fraley, 37,
provides daily accounts of her escape from $19,947 in credit card
debt.

"I teach people how to get out of debt for a living, but I couldn't
do it myself until I started the blog," said Fraley, who conducts
seminars in personal finance for a bank in Northern California. "I
started to write everything down, like, 'I saved 20 cents today by
parking at a meter that still had time on it.' I tell things I
wouldn't tell my family."

When she finally got out of debt in December, she said, "The blog was
the first people I told."

A Boston couple who call themselves the King and Queen of Debt
started their his-and-hers blog, "We're in Debt" (wereindebt.com), in
March as a way to talk to each other about their debt. They owed
$34,155.70 on their credit cards at the time, and an additional
$120,000, mostly in student loans.

"My wife and I have good communication skills in every avenue of life
except finances," said the King of Debt, who insisted on anonymity
because, he said, "we don't want our parents to find out and kill
us."

Starting the blog, he said, "was a way to communicate. We'd write
articles and learn about each other. She learned how addicted to
gadgets I was. When we married, we never talked about finances."

Like other bloggers interviewed, Tricia said she and her husband had
arrived at their debt gradually, not by big financial crises but by
regularly spending more money than they made, using credit that was
offered freely by credit card companies.

"It was nothing over the top," said a Georgia blogger who calls
himself NCN, for No Credit Needed, describing how his credit card
balance reached $11,510.22.

"Just pretty much what everyone I know does and continues to do," NCN
said. "Every month I'd say, 'We're going to pay off this credit card
completely.' Then I'd say, 'OK, just this month we'll let it slide.'
Then you wake up and you have $5,000 on your credit card."

He says on his blogs (ncnblog.com and ncnnetwork .com) that he has no
debt now and no credit cards. Like other blogs, his sites run
advertisements for debt-reduction services, and NCN says he makes a
small profit.

Tricia said her credit problems began in her freshman year at
Michigan Technological University, when she opened a Visa account in
return for the campus sign-up premium, a large candy bar. Since then,
she said, she has rarely made more than minimum payments. As credit
card companies offered her more cards and deeper credit lines, she
said she kept her balance close to the maximum, eventually topping
$37,000. Even as her credit card debt surpassed her annual income,
she assumed that someday she would make more money and pay it off.

"They just kept giving more credit, more credit," she said. "I don't
blame them for my use, because that's on me, but it didn't help that
they gave so much out."

She said she never discussed her debt with family or friends.

"You don't want them to know," she said.

For the engaged couple who say they are behind a blog called "Make
Love, Not Debt" (makelovenotdebt.com; net worth: negative
$66,274.27), the feedback from readers has not always been gentle.

"People have very strong feelings about debt," said the blog's female
half, who calls herself Her. "People were appalled by my spending,
like buying a $500 pair of shoes."

"Just having the amount of debt we have is offensive to a lot of
people," said Him. "People will levy personal attacks for mistakes we
acknowledge. We don't think that's quite necessary."

When they discussed wanting a $25,000 wedding, one reader scolded
them: "Grow up, a wedding isn't about how much debt you put yourself
or your parents into. If you are worried about that, in my opinion,
you are not ready for marriage."