The Lounge Suite We Paid For Three Times Over

A home that looked paid for

When Thandeka and I got our first proper place, a small rented house in Boksburg with a wild little garden, we wanted it to look like we had arrived. We were both working, both young, both the first in our families to have jobs with payslips and provident funds, and there was a feeling, which I only understand now, that we had to prove something. To whom, I could not tell you. Ourselves, probably. Our parents, who had worked so hard so that we could stand where we stood.

So we furnished it the way everyone around us furnished their homes, which is to say on credit. A lounge suite from one store, the big soft kind with the recliner that Thandeka loved. A fridge and a washing machine from another. A television that was far larger than that lounge needed. A bed, a dining set, curtains, all of it on various accounts, each one with its own little card and its own little monthly amount that seemed, on its own, entirely reasonable.

That is the trap, you see. Each one on its own is reasonable. It is the way they add up in the dark that gets you.

The month the sums stopped working

For a couple of years we managed, in the way you manage when you are not actually looking at the whole picture. We paid the minimums. We never added it all up in one place because some part of us did not want to see the total. We told ourselves it was fine, that everyone did this, that we were building a life.

Then the interest rates went up, and up again, and the bond on the car and the accounts all climbed together, and one month I sat down with all the statements spread across that same lounge suite we were still paying for, and I did the thing I had been avoiding for two years. I added it up. All of it. The total was so much larger than I had let myself imagine that I actually felt sick, a real physical turn in my stomach, sitting there on furniture I did not truly own surrounded by appliances the stores could technically still take back.

I remember doing a second sum that was even worse. I worked out, roughly, what we had already paid on that lounge suite in interest and fees over the time we had owned it. We had paid for it, in effect, about three times over, and we still owed on it. Three lounge suites' worth of money for one tired, sagging lounge suite. I did not tell Thandeka that night. I could not find the words.

The pretending stage

What followed was a bad year that I am not proud of. We did what a lot of people do, which is pretend. We shuffled money from one account to cover another. We took a small loan to pay off a store card and felt briefly clever, not noticing we had simply moved the problem and added to it. I started dreading the end of the month the way you dread a dentist you have put off for too long. The phone would ring with numbers I did not recognise and I would let it go to voicemail, and the voicemails piled up, and the dread piled up with them.

The worst part was what it did to us. Thandeka and I, who had never really fought, started fighting, always about money and never actually about money, if you understand me. It was never the rands. It was the shame underneath the rands. We were both carrying it and neither of us wanted to put it down on the table where the other could see it.

The conversation on the kitchen floor

It broke open one night when a particular payment bounced and a particular account went into arrears and I finally, finally told her the real total. Not the version I had been managing her with. The whole thing. We ended up sitting on the kitchen floor, backs against the cupboards, both of us a bit broken, and it was, strange to say, the best conversation we had had in a year, because at last it was honest.

We agreed, there on the floor, that we were done pretending. Neither of us knew what that meant practically. We only knew that whatever we had been doing was not working and was quietly poisoning our marriage.

I started reading, properly, the next day, about what options actually existed for people in our situation, which turned out to be more than I had assumed. I had vaguely heard of Debt Review before but had always imagined it was for people far worse off than us, people losing their homes, not two employed people who had simply over-furnished a rented house. The more I read, the more I understood that it exists precisely for people like us, people who can pay something, just not everything the way it is currently structured.

Learning the difference between the options

One of the most useful things I did was sit down and actually understand the difference between the paths available, because I had been using the words interchangeably out of ignorance. I had thought Debt consolidation and formal review were the same thing, and they are not. Consolidation is rolling what you owe into a single arrangement so you are not juggling ten payment dates and ten sets of fees. The formal review process is a legal protection with its own rules and its own structure. Understanding which one actually fitted our situation, rather than guessing, was the first time in two years I had felt like I was steering instead of being dragged.

I will be honest about something else, because I promised myself this story would be honest. There are a lot of people out there who will promise to fix your debt and are really just after another fee from a desperate person. I was nervous, having already made the mistake of a clever loan that was not clever. So I was careful. I checked that whoever I spoke to was properly registered and regulated, because reputable Debt Review Companies in South Africa operate under the National Credit Regulator, and the ones that do are a very different animal from the ones that simply advertise miracles. Debt Review Companies that are doing it properly will explain the downsides to you, not just the upsides, and that is how I learned to tell them apart.

The slow, unglamorous climb out

I want to be careful not to make this sound like a fairy tale, because it was not. Getting our affairs restructured meant accepting some hard things. There were things we could not do while we were sorting ourselves out. There was a discipline to it that neither of us had ever really had, because we had never been taught it, because nobody teaches you this. We learned to live on what was actually ours, which was a smaller and realer number than the lifestyle we had been performing.

But slowly, month by month unglamorous month, the picture changed. The phone stopped ringing with numbers I feared. The end of the month stopped being a dentist's appointment. One by one the accounts that had been drowning us got dealt with, and the day one of them finally closed for good, Thandeka and I went and sat on that same old lounge suite, the one we had paid for three times, and we did not say anything grand. We just sat there, in a house that was slowly, genuinely becoming ours in the ways that mattered.

The suite is still here, by the way. It sags worse than ever. We could replace it now, carefully, with money that is actually ours. But neither of us wants to. It is the one honest teacher we ever had. Every time I sink into that tired old recliner I remember the sum I did that made me sick, and I remember the kitchen floor, and I remember that the most expensive thing we ever bought was not the furniture. It was the pretending. We finally stopped paying for that, and it turned out to be the only purchase that ever actually made us richer.