The Joy of Trash

A few months back, I had a horrifying realization: I would never be able to pay off my credit card debt if I went the conventional route and paid the bare minimum every month and whatever more I could muster.

I had a horrifying image of myself at sixty, exhausted, dispirited, and depressed, with one hundred thousand dollars in debt and all of the misery that comes along with having carried that awful weight for decades.

It’s exhausting being broke. It’s dispiriting. It takes a lot out of you. It ages you.

It sucks to go to bed every night and wake up every morning knowing, deep in your gut,that you will never get out of debt, that the awful heaviness will follow to your grave.

It sucks feeling like a failure because everyone in the world seems to have figured out how to survive in a capitalist economy except for you. It’s the worst feeling in the world to wonder if you can even call yourself a professional writer if you can’t make a decent living twenty-eight years into what once seemed like a pretty impressive career.

As a staff writer at The A.V. Club and The Dissolve, I thought I would never be able to make it as a freelancer. It seemed like an insanely stressful, precarious way to make a living. I didn’t think I had the thick skin, self-esteem, or bulletproof confidence necessary to make it such a demanding field.

Turns out I was right!

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was in part because I had undiagnosed and untreated bipolar two and AU-DHD. One of the many regrettable symptoms of ADHD is rejection hypersensitivity. Also, being bad with money.

It’s not something anyone wants, but it is particularly difficult if you work in a field where rejection is constant.

For most of my freelance career, I’ve vowed to do more work than I, or anyone else, can do in exchange for sixty or seventy-five percent of the money I need to just barely survive.

Sometimes, I wonder how I got to be in so much debt. It’d almost be easier if I could blame it on cocaine, a gambling addiction, having opened a failed restaurant, or betting heavily on NFTs or meme coins, but debt is a vicious cycle. It’s quicksand. Once you fall in, it’s hard to get out, and all of your furious machinations get you in deeper and deeper. One of the savage iniquities of capitalism is that you make money being rich while being broke and in debt costs you financially and in a myriad of other ways.

Ten years of never making enough money and having more debt than I can carry has left me in a deep financial hole that I’ve worried I would never crawl out of.

So I made a choice. I’d been in this position before towards the end of my time at The A.V. Club in 2012when I was in such a precarious state financially that I signed on with a shady debt consolidation program.

Like I said before, I am really not good with money.

They assured me they would solve all of my problems for a fee. They charged an enormous sum of money every month in exchange for doing nothing.

I’ll never forget, despite years of therapy and medication, the awful moment when I opened my front door and was handed paperwork from a sheriff informing me that American Express was suing me for non-payment and that I would have to go to court to defend myself.

That was not great.

It was then that I realized what a con the debt consolidation company/industry was. I was not wrong. They weren’t just sleazy or unethical; they were criminals.

They were rightly sued out of existence. A year or two later, I got a check as part of a settlement they had to pay to the people they’d ripped off.

It took me way too long to wake up to the fact that the debt consolidation company charged me seven hundred dollars a month for something I could do myself.

So I called up the collection agencies hounding me and offered them a deal: I’d pay seventy-five percent of what I owed because it was better than the alternative, which was nothing.

I used my final payment from Scribner for You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me to pay off my creditors, most notably American Express.

That was, unfortunately, thirteen years ago. A lot can happen in that time, good and bad, but, as far as money is concerned, mostly bad.

Since letting my cards go to collection and arranging a settlement where I could pay off my card permanently worked last time, I figured it would also work this time.

So, metaphorically speaking, I spiked the football. I let things go from bad to worse so that I could make them better, hopefully permanently.

I let several of my credit cards go to collection. Then I called them up and played Let’s Make a Deal. I’ve already paid off my Best BuyVisa. I’m halfway through paying off my Sears Visa, and I’ve begun a lengthy process of paying off American Express. 

As I have learned through painful firsthand experience, they don’t play. And yes, after suing me for non-payment, they gave me a credit card, and I accepted. I guess neither of us learned anything.

The great part about this is that I’m paying about twenty-five percent less than I would otherwise, and also that I’m closing out my credit cards permanently, so I won’t have to deal with the everyday nightmare of paying over an insane amount in interest indefinitely for the honor of remaining in debt.

I feel that fifteen to twenty thousand dollars would solve many of my financial problems. I’d be able to cut my debt in half, save some money, and make some crucial investments in my business.

I was hoping that the Indiegogo campaign for my Every Episode Ever Saturday Night Live 50th anniversarybook/column idea last year would raise the necessary funds but I screwed the pooch on that one, and raised a little over five thousand dollars after very stupidly forgetting when the campaign ended.

I have a Kickstarter on the horizon and the long-awaited release of The Fractured Mirror. There’s also the autism-themed book I am going to write. That’s the only book idea I have that I suspect my agent might be interested in. It would be wonderful to have a prestigious publisher again. The self-publishing, self-promotion hustle is tough. 

I don’t know that I would have experienced even modest success without a sizable assist from “Weird Al” Yankovic, who co-wrote Weird Al: The Book with me and wrote the introduction, copy-edited and fact-checked The Weird Accordion to Al, my epic 2020 book on his life’s work. I was enormously lucky to have the enthusiastic support of one of the most beloved entertainers alive. That was huge. It’s a whole lot harder to sell books on my own, when I’m not piggybacking on someone else’s popularity.

I feel confident about my upcoming Kickstarter and The Fractured Mirror, partly because I’ve spent the last three months obsessively cranking out draft after draft.

I finished reading the eleventh draft this morning and was blown away.

It turns out that I am a REALLY good writer and author-person. The Fractured Mirror is the biggest and best book I’ve ever written. It is pathological and obsessive in the best way.

Because I have put so much work, time, and effort into The Fractured Mirror, it’s taken me substantially longer to publish it than I had hoped.

I feel like I can settle a lot of my financial problems with a successful Kickstarter campaign and an excellent start for The Fractured Mirror.

The problem is that it could be two or three months before that happens. I was hoping that I would be able to fix my problems without my wife knowing so that I could surprise her, but that, alas, is not going to happen. As with many of my goals, I didn’t quite make it. 

My biggest debt is for dental implants. Even with the money kind folks were generous enough to contribute to my GoFundMe, I will still be paying back a thousand dollars a month into the next decade. I don’t mind at all. Getting dental implants was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I haven’t regretted it for a minute. It has done wonders for my self-esteem and quality of life. It also makes me feel more confident in my ability to handle the present and the future. I don’t know if I could handle four more years of Trump with faulty dentures.

I feel like I’ll be okay if I can make it to May, but that’s nearly two very long months away.

I’m writing about this because it’s been weighing very heavily on my mind for, I dunno, the last two decades but also so that people who are struggling with sizable debt and all the awful things that come with it (depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, guilt, shame, hopelessness, inadequacy, and pessimism, just for starters) will know that they are not alone. 

I also want my fellow debtors to know that they can use my strategy to help pay down their debt as well. It’s surprisingly easy. My autism makes talking to strangers incredibly stressful, but all of the collection agencies I’ve spoken to have been eager to make a deal.

Sometimes creditors will email you terms for a settlement. That makes things even easier because you can forego the terror of an unstructured conversation with strangers.

You kind folks have supported me financially. I really appreciate that. Being broke and in debt for a long time has made me grateful and appreciative of any financial good fortune I experience. Regularly having a few thousand in a checking account probably wouldn’t mean much to most, but it means the world to me.

If you’d like to help me get to the promised land of May, you can assist in the following ways:

You can subscribe to my Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/c/nathanrabinshappyplace

Alternately, you could subscribe to my Substack (which is actually experiencing solid growth, which makes me very happy) here: 

Nathan Rabin's Bad Ideas

My Gofundme is still up because I still have a lot more to pay to those beautiful people who took me from toothless to perfect teeth: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants

You can also pre-order The Fractured Mirror at Backerkit for the low price of twenty dollars. Not bad for a book that’s twice as long as the average and took me long years to research, write and revise: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

You can also buy the many books that I have already published at my site’s shop: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop

Finally, y’all can PayPal me some scratch if so inclined. My handle is [email protected]

Hell, you could even bid on a sweet-ass 1 of 1 Rickey Henderson pop art print I’m trying to sell on Ebay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/286382105394

Of course, you don’t have to do any of that. You’ve already made my life and career better with your financial contribution to one of my various small businesses, but, you know, it never hurts to ask.

Of course, you don’t have to do any of that, but, you know, it never hurts to ask.