So in the fall of 1998, I was a college freshman, and I ended up with two credit cards. I didn’t go looking for them, really. There were tables set up on campus, representatives from the big banks, simple applications. Maybe some free pens or something. I had almost no credit history and no income to speak of, but that didn’t seem to matter. I filled out the paperwork, and a few weeks later, two cards showed up in the mail. The combined limit was about five thousand dollars.
I maxed them out pretty quickly. Dinners with friends, movies, going out. Nothing felt crazy at the time. It was just easy to swipe the card and not think too hard about it. But within a few months, both cards were at their limits, and I was barely making the minimum payments. And then as soon as a little bit of credit opened up, I’d spend it again. I started missing payments. My credit score got bad. I didn’t really understand what a credit score was back then, or why it mattered, but I could tell something wasn’t working.
The thing I remember most from that time is the anxiety. I’d be out with friends, and the check would come, and I’d feel this knot in my stomach. I’d be trying to remember what my balance was, whether there was enough room on the card. My checking account balance was also zero and waiting for the next payday. That fear of it getting declined in front of everyone. It sounds small, maybe, but it was constant. It followed me around for years.
The worst financial decision I made back then was buying a parrot.
I know that sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. An Amazon orange-winged parrot at a local pet store. Over a thousand dollars, spread across both credit cards that were already basically maxed out. I didn’t have time to take care of a bird. I didn’t have the space. I just saw it and wanted it, and I had these credit cards that made it feel like I could have it.
Many years later when the store was about to close for the last time, the shop owner remembered my purchase. How I desperately maxed out the two credit cards just to get the bird.
My parents ended up taking care of that parrot for years. When they eventually moved to Pennsylvania, the bird went with them. It died there, a long way from where it started. I think about that sometimes. A thousand-dollar impulse purchase when I was nineteen, and my parents were the ones who dealt with the consequences for years after.
This whole pattern went on for a long time. As my income grew, I got access to more credit. I learned about balance transfers at some point and started moving debt from one card to another to avoid interest. I thought I was being strategic. And maybe it was better than doing nothing. But I wasn’t actually fixing anything. I was just moving things around.
The thing is, I didn’t even realize I had a problem. I thought this was just how life worked. You spend money, you carry some debt, you manage it. I figured everybody lived like this.
It wasn’t until I got married that I started to see things differently. My wife Trisha grew up in a household where they actually talked about money. Where spending was intentional. She didn’t make me feel bad about where I was. She just helped me see that the way I’d been doing things wasn’t the only way. It wasn’t inevitable. It was just a pattern I’d fallen into because nobody ever showed me anything different.
Looking back at that campus in 1998, I’m not really angry at the credit card companies. They did what companies do. They saw a bunch of young people with no financial education and a lot of future earning potential, and they went after that market.
I’m not even angry at myself, honestly. I was eighteen. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
What stays with me is just how easy the whole thing was. How simple that application was. Nobody asked if I understood what I was signing up for. Nobody checked whether I had any ability to pay it back. The system made it incredibly easy to get in over my head, and then it was on me to figure out how to climb back out.
A few years after I graduated, Congress passed something called the CARD Act. It put some limits on how credit card companies could market to students. No more giving away gifts for filling out applications. No more approving teenagers who had no income and no co-signer. Schools had to start disclosing their deals with card issuers.
The law made a real difference. But it came too late for me, and for a lot of people my age who had already learned about credit the hard way.
And here’s the thing—the marketing to young people didn’t stop. It just shifted. Different tactics, different products. That’s what I want to dig into in the next post.
Sources
- Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 (CARD Act): Public Law 111-24