I held on to this attitude until my 40s, when I finally came crashing up against financial reality.
My children and I lived on bagels.
I had six-figure debt.
I felt as if I might melt with love, and something inside me shifted.
I called friends who were good with money.
One told me to jot down everything I earned and spent for a week.
He used the S wordspreadsheet.He might as well have told me to fly.
I wasn’t scared; I was paralyzed.
Some friends sorted through a bagful of bills I’d been too frightened to open.
Others helped me write creditors and set up payment schedules.
Gradually I learned to add (income) and subtract (expenses).
I stopped paying off old debt with new.
I love creating columns of numbers now, not to mention spreadsheets.
I boss my money around.
Occasionally, I help friends do it, too.
Sometimes, I see my grown-up children asking for receipts or calculating expenses.
When that happens, I have a go at keep from grinning.
That’s a feeling worth more than money.
I allowed myself to go crazy and saw that I was sane: My cravings were easily satisfied.
Through my spending, I acquired what I couldn’t buypeace of mind.
Year after year, the flowers returnand always for free.
On the subway home, I fingered the shiny leather cover of the account book.
I couldn’t wait to deposit more money and see the numbers grow.
As the train rounded a bend, I rested my head on my dad’s shoulder.
A loving father and money in the bank: What more could a girl want?
Quite a bit, as it turns out.
When my son was born, everything changed.
His birth was difficult, and he was in the neonatal intensive care unit for three weeks.
Insurance covered most of it, more than $100,000, but our bill was still considerable.
My son was so vulnerable, so beautiful, so…mine.
I couldn’t stop thinking about what might happen to him if something happened to me.
After nursing my baby boy one day in the NICU, I e-mailed my father.
“Should I start a 529 savings plan for my son’s education?”
I haven’t stopped buying beautiful things, but I have set different priorities.
I now possess several savings accounts and have money automatically deducted from my checking to fund them.
I wolfed it down on a bench amid the traffic of Broadway.
Start spreadin' the news, indeed.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford at least slightly better.
It was that I didn’t believe I could.
I had no faith I would make it as a writer.
Then, slowly, as editors began to publish my work, my fists loosened.
I bought lipstick at a department store instead of the dollar shop.
I supported a few charities.
And one day, I charged a leather jacket I’d fallen in love with at Coach.
I no longer eat my dinner on a park bench surrounded by traffic.
I was raised by a single mother.
She was a successful author but was sure that any second, we’d end up in the street.
So I became an anxious spender.
I got a credit card and quickly found myself $10,000 in debt.
I was practicing magical thinking: I believed that objects controlled my destiny.
Until I realized that the opinions of people I cared about didn’t waver based on what I owned.
That, in fact, the more my debt climbed, the more insecure I felt.
So I tried a new tactic to feel safe: I got rid of my credit cards.
For a while, I didn’t even have a debit card.
Instead, I bought everything with wads of cash.
Overspending, it turns out, wasn’t my true problem.
Seeing what $200 looked like finally helped me get real.
My husband didn’t expect a major financial contribution from me.
I thought that was fine.
I, on the other hand, expected plenty from him.
So I wasn’t a bit worried when the TV show my husband was producing came to an end.
He was an eight-time Emmy nominee; he’d find something else.
Less than a year later, we had a baby and he was still unemployed.
So I did what I do best: I panicked.
It was the worst time of my life; I felt totally out of control in every way.
Desperation and fear inspired me to hustle in a way I hadn’t before.
My first magazine feature covered two months' rent.
I felt empowered, and my husband was happy because now we were equal partners.
I would never again think that earning the money was someone else’s job.
__By Catherine Lloyd Burns__Every season, I become obsessed with a fashion accessory I cannot imagine living without.
Last year it was a Chloe bag that cost a little less than $2,000.
I visited it at department stores and ran my fingers over its zippers.
I almost bought it three times, even inventing the price I’d tell my husband I’d paid.
I tried to find another bag I could love.
The Chloe bag was perfect.
One afternoon, my daughter and I went into Saks to use the bathroom.
I showed her the bag.
I thought, I could buy this.
Or rather, I could charge this.
I put it over my shoulder and gazed at myself in the mirror.
Although I still act occasionally, it’s no longer easy to buy a pricey purse.
Yet I still couldn’t buy it.
It is very rock-and-roll, it’s not too heavy and it garners lots of compliments.
And I was able to pay for it.
Photo Credit: Devon Jarvis
