Debt Worth

Debt Worth

It started innocently enough, as I suppose all addictions do. Karen’s concern over her bills had caused her to start writing down her outstanding debts, the money she had on hand, her incoming wages and expected or even unexpected purchases. It was a haphazard personal balance sheet for herself that she updated regularly. These were written first on the backs of parking, or ATM or even grocery store receipts after moderate purchases, updating to the minute, her net worth. Periodic, ad hoc calculations kept in a bundle of receipts did not sate her for long. Soon, it became every day. Twice a day. Three times a day. She made a homemade “book” out of paper stapled down the middle and folded. To anyone else, it was a bramble of meaningless numbers. When her ex-boyfriend, Kevin, had given Karen the beautiful, slick, black bound Moleskine notebook, she was beyond thankful. It may have been the most thoughtful gift she had ever received. Kevin had seen her chaotic accounting system and gave her a way to make those notations gracefully, on lined, sturdy pages, with a place at the top to put the date and time. When he gave her the book, he jokingly had labeled it the “captain’s log” as an homage to their mutual love of the kitsch “Star Trek” series of the 1960s. Although Captain Kirk was the one who made notations in the “captain’s log” each week, Karen was much more the logical, restrained, precise, less emotional Mr. Spock, drafting her updated net worth any time she made a significant transaction. Her thoughts, concerns, anxieties and even dreams were reduced to numbers on a page.

Kevin had left a few years ago with a parting salvo that she loved the binder more than she loved him. As he said that, he had casually picked up the book just for emphasis and she had snatched it from his hands. “That is ridiculous,” she had said at the time, “I hate my debt. You can’t love something that you hate.” When she bought the donut a few days after their break up and reflexively entered -1.58 in her book, it dawned on her that she might be obsessed. She had the student loan of 17,842, car loan 1,543, credit card debt of 2,542 and a checking balance of 743.24. Together with her residual 2007 Pontiac value of about 1,200, she had a net value of –19,983.76 updated to –19,985.34 from the decrement of the jelly donut. In addition to realizing she had an obsession, she realized she had stayed around $20,000 in the negative for years with absolutely no noticeable progress. She would need a new car soon. Things would not get better with time. That negative number sat in indictment of her every time she opened that beautiful, anxiety-filled notebook. She felt like a failure.

Karen had a poor upbringing in Las Vegas, where she still lived. Six kids, a dog, two parents and a grandmother were crammed into a small, three-bedroom bungalow. She liked to say that her family’s “’game of thrones’ was trying to find a free commode.” Often the phone, electricity and yes, in those days, even the gas would be turned off for nonpayment. She didn’t know what a mortgage was at 10 years old but she knew it was late through the hushed, anxious, whispers of her parents. Now, here she was, a high school teacher, living paycheck to paycheck, barely paying interest on her debt, having made only tiny, incremental reductions to her debt in a decade. Her hourly concern with her “debt worth” (as she more accurately labeled it) stressed and yet somehow soothed her. To lose her obsession, she’d need to lose the debt. How? She had no idea. She wouldn’t dare waste money on fools’ gold like the lottery or gambling. She had nothing worth selling. She did not make much. And, her parents were so poor, they weren’t going to make out a Will, they’d make out a “won’t.” She figured that there was no way she was going to ever get ahead. She was destined to eke out a living, as her bank teller father and retail cashier mother had until they retired with their modest social security checks that paid the bills and nothing else. She had never been on a vacation. She never had a new car. She had never been to spa. Travel, owning her own place or getting pampered, seemed out of reach, even as she neared 40.

All of these thoughts were going through her head as she sat on the RTC bus that ran along the Strip. She was tired, hungry and frustrated as she traveled to her rented condo in Henderson, NV. She had taken her kids on a fun field trip to the Neon Museum. She had let the school bus driver take the kids back to school to meet their parents and said she would get home on her own. She got off the bus and walked the strip a little bit to clear her head, passing the few masked revelers laughing, carrying their oversized drinks and obviously living better than she to be so joyous. At the entrance to Harrah’s hotel, which is about half way down the strip, Karen saw a $5 bill sitting between two slot machines. She looked around to see if anyone nearby had lost it. It wasn’t a fortune, but it could make someone’s day to get it back. There was no one within hundreds of feet After securing it, her first impulse was to enter the sudden boon in her little black book. She reached in her purse for it. It wasn’t there. She looked frantically around. Where was it? She had last made a notation when she had bought a $1 bottled water from a street vendor and did not remember taking it out again since. Her life was in that book. She would trace her steps and find it if it killed her. For now, though, she had $5 that could not be entered into the ledger. That $5 was in “no man’s land.” Nothing existed for her unless it was marked in her journal. What would she do with the $5? She had to get it off her hands immediately, without either increasing or decreasing her current net worth. She couldn’t buy something of value with it since that would lead to the conundrum of whether she had also acquired an asset. With no book, she could not make a transaction. The numbers were fixed and precise. They couldn’t change until she changed them.

The answer was simple enough; she’d throw the damn fiver into one of these one-armed bandits. Brilliant. Give it to the likely eventual owner anyway; the casino. With the $1 Wheel of Fortune machine right there, she put the $5 in and pulled the handle the old-fashioned way. Ding, ding, ding...one dollar gone. This was too slow. She had to get moving on finding her “captain’s log.” She played max credits, ding, ding ding, two more gone. She did the same again, ding, ding, BING! Whoooump. She won 20 credits. Darn it. The longer this took, the more she was losing time catching up with her ledger. Play, play, play again, nothing, nothing, nothing, and she was down to two credits. “Play,” she banged the button this time, hoping that was it, starting to move towards the Strip even before the reels stopped. “Wheel of....Fortune!” the machine yelled. The last reel was all lit up and showing on “Spin Wheel” as the machine played anticipatory music. Karen saw a “Spin Wheel” button on the machine and hit that button to placate the machine. Whoosh, Tick, tick, tick made the spinning wheel at the top of the machine as it went past each number. She was so frustrated because she was sure it would give her another 20 credits and she’d have to go through this all over again before starting her journey to find her journal. Except, when the clicker finally stopped, it stopped on 20,000 credits. She had won $20,000. Lights were going off like crazy on her machine. There was no one around to witness it but an attendant came by and asked her if she would like to cash out and get her photo taken. She declined the photo. She took a receipt for the money. The attendant had never seen a sadder winner. Karen desperately wished she had her binder! She HAD to get it back soon. Then, she could calculate where she stood.

She held onto that $20,000 ticket, but it rattled her without her being able to enter it into her notebook. It was her albatross. Her Fitbit said she walked 22,000 steps retracing her previous walk. Then, she walked it again. She called the RTC line and Neon Museum and asked if anyone turned in a black bound book. No luck so far. They promised to contact her if it turned up. Days went by. There was no word. She was not sleeping at night, wondering who might be holding her book, or worse, if it was sitting somewhere, in a crevice, out in the cold. When she finally collapsed, she dreamt of drowning in numbers. She was distracted and out of sorts. Friends and family kept asking if she was ok. She wasn’t. Why not just pay her bills and create a new ledger? That’s the logical move. Obsessions don’t do logic. She knew it was counter to all common sense but she either had to have the binder or had to be unburdened of the $20,000 if she was ever to sleep again. As hope of finding the binder dimmed, her thoughts turned to how a person might get rid of money quickly, easily and without any fear of it changing the numbers currently in the book? Gambling backfired. She thought about a charity. That, however, would mess with her adjusted gross income.

Then she remembered her father, stubbornly holding on to his “Blockbuster” stock as cable and dish networks were making VCRs obsolete. He kept saying it would come back, that it would change with the times. It didn’t. The stock had become worthless, a “penny stock” they called it, after years of trading at $50 per share. During her Christmas break, she devoured cable news reports, scanned financial magazines and found the “dinosaur” that pundits universally panned as the best bet to reach rock bottom in early 2021. It clearly was a remnant of the past; a brick-and-mortar store, made obsolete by the internet, online gaming, music sharing and virtual reality. She cashed out her $20,000 and, against the vehement exhortations of the stock broker she hired, invested the entirety of her cash at $17 per share on January 4, 2021 in a has- been-relic of a bygone era. The stockbroker told her it would probably be worthless by the end of January 2021. She had smiled when he said that. Good. Money is a fiction. It’s all just ledger notations. She needed to rid herself of this money since she could not make it a notation on her ledger.

When you try to fail but succeed, which have you done? Karen had instructed her stockbroker to sell the GameStop stock she had bought at the end of January 2021 when he promised her it would be worthless. In the strangest twist of fate, the stock that everyone universally declared as worthless was somehow manipulated to increase its value by 1,900% in 24 days. Her stockbroker used words like “insider trading.” She didn’t know what that meant. She did understand she had made $388,072 in a month. Does she still obsess about her notebook? Come on... She employs an accountant who does. She did buy a nice replacement notebook, though, and at her opulent home or when traveling, she sleeps soundly every night keeping the book under her pillow.