The JAFAQs that came to your inbox this morning was missing the audio component. Sorry! It’s in there now for your listening pleasure. XO
Welcome back to JAFAQs, a weekly series that is exactly what it sounds like: answers to the most common questions I've gotten since I started addressing my $20k of personal debt.
No time to read? We got you. Listen on-the-go with the audio version above.
Do you have a question about debt, personal finance, budgeting, mental health, life in New York, dairy-free cheese, or literally anything else? Send them to realgirlproject@gmail.com + come back every Wednesday to see the answers.
Dear friends, we have arrived at the sixth and final installment of the “Bitch, how the fuck did you get into this much debt?” series. I have enjoyed reminiscing on all the ways I incurred more than $20,000 of debt.
Psych - I haven't enjoyed it at all. But, I could easily write six more newsletters on this topic, and I will! Once we raise the capital to complete and publish the fully realized version of Debt Heads.
If you’ve enjoyed reading this column, listening to Debt Heads, or any of the many related Instagram reels we’ve published over the past couple of weeks, might you leave us a rating and review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or consider supporting our work by becoming a paid subscriber to Jamie AF? 😇 no pressure.
OK! It’s showtime. Grand finale. Let’s go.
First up, a quick recap on the topics we’ve covered in the series so far:
Part one connected overspending to codependent behavior. Part two discussed avoidance of pain, including the pain of debt. Part three drew a line from my shitty self-esteem to my shitty bank balance. And last week, in part four, we ran the numbers on the notoriously low-paying field of journalism in which I’ve spent most of my career.
Last week, we discussed the ways being forced into feeling like you need a credit card to participate in society is a predatory practice, especially when… and here comes part six: you have no real financial education. That’s right, this week we’re talking financial literacy, or lack thereof.
To begin this conversation, you should know that I had a pretty charmed public school experience here in New York City. I earned a spot in my elementary school’s gifted and talented program (or talented and gifted program, depending on what year you attended the program); I was the lead in many a school play; I auditioned, and was accepted to, one of the most prestigious performing arts high schools in the country – a chapter that ended with me being chosen as graduation speaker for a class of either 500 or 600. It was a long time ago. I don’t remember.
Charmed, indeed. But not exactly successful. I was kicked out of the gifted and talented program in elementary school. Senior year, I failed a required class that put my chance to graduate and, more importantly, my chance to be the graduation speaker – in jeopardy.
There were many reasons I wasn’t great at school. Undiagnosed learning disabilities, family trauma, caring more about getting my teachers to be my friend than getting them to give me good grades.
My school struggles used to be a source of shame until I realized that school is not actually about learning things that truly matter in life, if it were, then it would surely have taught me something practical. Like - how to grow my own food without destroying the soil. Or change a flat tire so that years in the future when the NYPD tows my car and flattens all my tires in the process I know how to change them. How to speak to myself and others with compassion and neutrality. Okay - maybe those are pipe dreams.
After all, it was very important that I learn about the pythagorean theorem. That has really helped us all achieve the socio-political maturity we are currently witnessing on the world stage.
But if school were to have made some time for something practical, perhaps it could have been … I don't know - personal finance?
Of all the things I find lacking in my education (of the G&T variety and otherwise), personal finance feels the most glaringly obvious.
It did not exist in my school. It did not exist in my home. And a non-scientific survey of most people I know, including most of the people we’ve interviewed for our podcast Debt Heads, reveals it wasn’t in their schools or homes, either.
In fact, as of April 2023 there was just one personal finance course, taught in the entire New York City public school system. And it's an elective.
There are many things… many of us don’t know.
We don’t know how to budget.
We don’t know how to balance a checkbook. Some of us don’t know how to write a check.
We don’t know how credit works – even though we’re told we need it to do things like rent an apartment, have a car or exist.
We don’t know how to do our taxes, or how to invest for retirement and for the many of us who are freelancers these days, we don't have an HR department doing it for us. We have to figure out how to do it ourselves, once we figure out that we have to do it at all.
And what we don’t know can hurt us. At least financially. According to a report released earlier this year, 38% of Americans said lack of financial literacy cost them at least $500 in 2022. Some went so far as to say it cost them up to $10,000.
What does it cost? Well, access to a high credit limit without having an understanding of how credit cards work cost me to the tune of more than $20,000.
Not having a budget resulted in massive overspending that similarly cost me thousands, as I realized the first time I calculated my monthly historical spending and found I’d spent $700 on restaurants alone.
Not understanding how student loans work has landed thousands of people in an overwhelming amount of debt once they enter the workforce.
Unlike our parents, we’re not balancing our checkbooks and thus, not keeping as close tabs on money coming in and out, it’s much easier for us to not know how much money we have.
We no longer have to fill out deposit slips or cash checks or even go to the bank at all for most things. Banking is automatic, at the touch of a button, basically invisible. It’s convenient, sure, but it also makes it harder to understand.
Former colleagues, and those who have been thrust into the gig economy as a result of mass layoffs spanning so many industries, don’t realize they have to set aside 30% of their income for taxes, leaving them with a massive bill once tax season arrives.
The more I write about being in debt, talk to people about money and glean a (slightly) better understanding of the economy – the more I realize how our lack of financial literacy works to keep us from achieving financial freedom, and which aspects of that are by design by the powers that be.
Maybe I should all crash the one personal finance course they offer at the one highschool in New York City. That would be weird. I'm technically an adult. And I can’t go back in time, or retroactively stop myself from getting into debt. But I and we can educate ourselves, be in community with people who are figuring this shit out, and start to question why the hell such a fundamental piece of the human experience is so widely left out of our long – extremely long – academic lives.
Then, maybe we can work to change it. How? I don’t know, by listening to Debt Heads?
Just an idea.