Hello, my name is John Block. I am 35 years old, I have a PhD, I work full time, and a few days ago I realized that I was almost totally broke.
How did this happen? Well as it turns out being a graduate student in the humanities doesn’t pay all that much. While I didn’t take out any new debt to get my PhD, I had to live off of a stipend that didn’t amount to a whole lot. Low on funds, I was lured by credit cards and lived beyond my means. While some of the purchases I made on credit were necessities or things that could advance my career, I can completely cop to having been irresponsible in many ways. When I finally landed a job in my field, I had to move across country, which racked up even more debt. Worse still, my new job was in one of the most expensive cities in the USA, and I knew no one in town, so I had to get an apartment alone. While I had the great new job it came with expenses I’d failed to account for: replacing my student health insurance with an expensive employer based plan and having to pay into a mandatory retirement plan I hadn’t accounted for in estimating my cost of living. This was to say nothing of the student loan debt from my B.A., deferred during my graduate program, that was finally coming due.
A few weeks into the job I continued to coast, deliberately ignoring the disparity between my paycheck and my rising credit card balances. Yet each day the nagging fear and the mounting anxiety seemed to grow until a few days ago I was finally forced to confront that things were very, very wrong. I ran the numbers and I broke down crying. When I tallied up my rent, my bills, my student loan payment, and (worst of all) my minimum monthly credit card payments, I was looking at about $191 per month to buy food, put gas in my car (and insure it!), and to cover extravagances like replacing clothes and shoes when they get holes in them. Forget retirement, forget savings, forget the future.
Worst of all, the situation appeared entirely hopeless. While I was lucky enough to be able to afford the minimum monthly payments on my debts, when I ran the long term math it seemed to promise me that I would be stuck in this miserable situation for the next 20 years.
When the enormity of the situation dawned on me, I alternated between pacing back and forth across my apartment, and sitting on my couch and crying. My mind went to very dark places. To put it bluntly, I had just about the shittiest four days of my life.
When I finally put myself back together, I decided I was not going to take the situation lying down. What I needed was a plan, what I needed was perspective, patience, and discipline. While I knew there wasn’t a magic bullet that could take care of this problem overnight, I knew that if I could hustle a bit harder, save a bit more, and get a little creative, that I could work my way out of this thing.
I started this blog to share my experience with others who may find themselves in a similar situation so that they might benefit from know that they are not alone, and that my experiences and efforts to work my way out of crushing debt might help others. I hope, also, that you might share your own experiences and ideas with me and that maybe we could create a whole community of broke people trying to be a little less broke. I also started it because it feels therapeutic to get this off of my chest. My debt makes me feel ashamed, demoralized, anxious, stressed, and depressed, but I’ve realized that the more I talk about it, and hash things out, the better I feel.
So welcome, I hope that this story, and the experiences I share here, can be helpful to people out there.
The Broke Humanist 