How I Got (Mostly) Out of Debt!
Around six or seven months ago I found myself in a dilly of a pickle. My Patreon income had remained fairly consistent throughout the early months of the pandemic but at a certain point it hit a wall, hard, and plummeted from thirty five hundred dollars a month to around twenty-five hundred dollars.
I had wracked up roughly thirty thousand dollars worth of debt on ten or twelve credit cards. On any given day, I only had about a hundred dollars in combined unused credit on my many, many credit cards.
Royalties for The Weird Accordion to Al had similarly nose-dived and my freelance career outside of this website, books and the Travolta/Cage podcast was borderline non-existent.
It was costing me 800 to 1000 dollars a month just to remain in debt indefinitely. Between credit card interest and the mortgage I had about two hundred dollars a month in Patreon income left for food, childcare, medical care and everything else that comes with having two small children in a capitalist society.
Not to put too fine of a point on it, bur I was fucked. Seriously fucked! Unless I acted quickly and decisively, my financial future looked grim.
That’s the fucked up thing about credit card debt. If you spend a lot of money on a house you can’t quite afford, you at least have the house. If you blow your money on a car, you have a car but if you owe thirty thousand dollars to Visa, Master card and American Express, then all you get for all of that squandered money is the guilt and shame that comes with feeling powerless and overwhelmed when it comes to money.
I had to do something big so for the first time in twenty-five years I applied for a job, this time as a staff writer for a pop culture website. I don’t want to brag, but a mere three or four months after I sent in my application I received a form rejection email.
My other desperate efforts to get out of debt proved more successful. I emailed the dude who handles my money and asked him if withdrawing money from my 401K to get out of a desperate financial bind would make any sense.
I was overjoyed to learn that despite the pandemic and global economic crash the stock market was apparently doing just swimmingly, to the point where I could withdraw fifteen thousand dollars from my 401K and still have as much money left as I thought I did. Also, because of the pandemic they were waving the early withdrawal fee and I wouldn’t have to pay taxes on the money until next year.
I’d always seen taking money out of a retirement fund before retirement as an act of desperation, the financial equivalent of a “break in case of emergency” alarm. Well, this was a goddamn emergency so I was breaking that case and borrowing against my future because sweet lord did I ever need that money, and quick.
But that wasn’t anywhere near enough. So I decided to do something that had worked out spectacularly well for me before: self-publishing a book through crowd-funding.
That was one of the catalysts behind The Joy of Trash. I was fortunate in that The Weird Accordion to Al gave me a sturdy, dependable blueprint for self-publishing books that made money and made readers happy.
Like The Weird Accordion to Al, The Joy of Trash is a literary spin-off of a website I would probably be unhealthily obsessed with even it was not my own, and affords me an opportunity to distill this wonderful website in its purest form, in a way even people who’ve never heard of it can enjoy and appreciate.
The Joy of Trash Kickstarter turned out great. It made even more money than The Weird Accordion to Al Kickstarter campaign and it is incredibly validating knowing that people you’ve never met are incredibly excited about a book you’re going to put out.
With the help of a stimulus payment and a second Kickstarter for the “Weird Al” Yankovic coloring book, I managed to chip away at my credit card debt to the point where I now only owe about five thousand dollars.
I can’t say how exciting it is to not literally owe tens of thousands of dollars to evil corporate parasites, to not have so much debt that you think you’ll never get out from under it.
Here’s the thing: my relative financial health is incredibly precarious. It would take almost nothing to destroy it: a big tax bill, medical bill, pet or dental emergency could knock me on my ass and send me back into a world of crushing credit card debt.
But I at least have a fighting chance now of being debt free rather than a lifelong prisoner of debt. And that feels good.
Who knows what tomorrow will bring? If the past is any indication, I’ll get back into debt, and then get out of it, and then get back into it. Like so much else in life, debt is cyclical but I will do my damnedest going forward to make sure my money goes to things that matter and make my family’s life’s better and more joyful and not to a bunch of evil credit card companies that make vast fortunes by ensuring that people like me never get out of debt.
History, fortunately, is not destiny. So even though it sure feels like I have struggled mightily with money my entire life, that doesn’t necessarily have to be true in the years ahead.
It certainly doesn’t hurt that I’ve begun implementing all of the life lessons I’ve acquired through Joker motivational memes but mostly I owe my vastly improved finances to self-discipline, initiative, hard work, the support and generosity of you beautiful, generous people and, as always, more than a little bit of luck.
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