by Karyn Bosnak
I added the picture of me behind the computer to the front page, and the picture of me writing in my checkbook to the Grand Debt Tally page. Then, I wrote my first weekly update. When it was all said and done, I pushed the Publish button, and savekaryn.com was now up and running.
WEEKLY UPDATE—FIRST DAY OF WEBSITE LAUNCH
June 23, 2002
Hello! Welcome to my first weekly update! I’ll keep it brief…I have been busy launching my low-budget website and planning my marketing strategy. Each week I am going to auction off something that I just “had to have” on eBay. You can click on the “Buy Karyn’s Stuff” tab at the left to get more information on that. This week’s “Big Ticket Item” is a pair of rubber Prada boots that I got on sale at Neiman Marcus. I think I wore them once. Check ’em out! All the money I raise from the auctions will go toward paying off my debt! You see, I’m doing my part!
I have also created a section called “The Daily Buck.” This section will be updated daily and will contain tidbits of information on what I did that day to save a buck or make a buck. You may greatly benefit from some of these things. Please accept these daily morsels as free tips to help you be thrifty like me!
So, check out the website, and let me know what you think. Click on the “Contact Karyn” link and send me an e-mail! Also, please help spread the word about savekaryn.com. Send website links to your friends, talk about me at bars (it wouldn’t be the first time…), dream about me at night. Together we can make a difference!
FOURTEEN
DATE: July 12, 2002
FROM: Sully
TO: Karyn
SUBJECT: You are not alone
Hi, Karyn: I just wanted to let you know I enjoyed your website. I am an ex-Brooklynite myself, and had to chuckle to myself that only a Brooklynite would have the chutzpah to do what you are doing.
There is no way, of course, for me to know whether you’re actually paying off your debt with the money you receive or just throwing it away frivolously, but you come off as a pretty honest person, so I am going to send you a couple of bucks.
Thanks, and good luck!
FROM: Karyn
TO: Sully
SUBJECT: Re: You are not alone
Thank you! You’ll have to take my word for it. I grew up Catholic and have this HORRIBLE Catholic guilt! All the years of private school…. If I say I’m paying my credit card bills with what you give me, then I’M PAYING MY CREDIT CARD BILLS WITH WHAT YOU GIVE ME! If I lied about it, heaven wouldn’t let me in.
WEEK 1: GETTING THE WORD OUT
On Monday, June 24, I started in a new position at my job. I was now an episode producer and was assigned to work with an editor named Randy, who was foxy! He had ice-blue eyes and jet-black hair and was a hunk of burning love.
But anyway, Randy and I were assigned to work on the series finale for Dog Days: the doggie wedding. Yep. A Jack Russell terrier named Cherry found her true love to be a Great Dane named Atticus. And Randy and I were in charge of the episode from the proposal on the Brooklyn Bridge to the doggie wedding, where Cherry wore a $1,200 Elizabethan doggie wedding dress. We even had to edit the doggie honeymoon at the Loews Hotel. Seriously, this was my job.
The first day that Randy and I were put together was also the first day that we were able to look at field tape. Usually the field tape is logged and the producer, who was me, would have a chance to look at it before being put with an editor. But the turnaround time from when the tape was due was so fast that there wasn’t time to do it. So Randy and I sat in a room with thirty or forty hours of unlogged footage and picked out the best clips to create one forty-six-minute episode. It was quite a challenge, to be honest.
So, for the next two days that was all I did. I got to work at 9 A.M., and left work around 9 P.M. By the time my CreditGUARD of America charge, website charges and PO box charges cleared, I was again dead broke. And I wouldn’t be getting paid until July 8. But despite how busy or poor I was, I updated my site and added my Daily Bucks.
Monday, June 24, 2002
Today I entered a contest in the NY Post to win a motorcycle. I don’t know how to drive a motorcycle. But I figure if I win it I’ll sell it and use the cash to help pay off my debt. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Tuesday, June 25, 2002
Today I was so poor that I bought a turkey sandwich on bread with mustard and ate half of it for lunch and half of it for dinner. I was hungry, but I could stand to lose a few pounds. Maybe I could be a supermodel.
Wednesday, June 26, 2002
Today I called about an ad that I saw on a website looking for volunteers to participate in a PMS study. I left a message. If they approve me, I can make $500 AND I’ll get a free exam. Since I don’t have health insurance, the free exam would save me around $200! So technically, if they accept me, I’ll come out $700 ahead!
By the time Wednesday rolled around, I e-mailed the initial twelve people back and asked them to visit my new low-budget website! I tried to keep all the responses light and funny, because I thought they’d be more likely to donate. I also asked them to forward the website to all of their friends.
On Thursday morning I woke up early and checked my e-mail, and Nikki did indeed send her $5 through PayPal! I was so excited! Attached to her e-mail was a note.
I hope my $5 gets the ball rolling. I used to be in a similar situation. My advice is to lose the extras. Ditch the cell phone, cancel the long distance, buy phone cards, and stop eating out.
At least you admit that you have to do something about it. Good luck! I will be checking your website for updates!
Nikki from Chicago
After I read it, I stood up and jumped up and down! And she was from Chicago! A good ole Midwesterner to the rescue! I sent her a thank-you e-mail, and then shut Claire down and went to work. When I arrived, Randy was already there, eagerly awaiting my presence.
“Hey, did you know Atticus went engagement-collar shopping for Cherry?” he asked.
“I actually did know that,” I said. “Did he pick out a nice one?”
“No, he was too cheap to buy one,” he said, laughing. “The collars were like sixty dollars and stuff. I wouldn’t buy one either.”
“They were that much?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “They had like doggie breath mints at this place, and something called ‘poochie sushi,’ and apparently they’re having a doggie ice cream social soon.”
“They had it already,” I said, as if I had major gossip. “And Cherry and Atticus both went. It was when the in-laws got to meet.” This was true. Cherry’s mom and Atticus’s dad set up the wedding, so they had to make sure that Cherry’s dad and Atticus’s mom approved of the other dog. Seriously, this was my job. Randy and I got back to work, and I realized that he was really nice. We had worked in a ten-by-ten-feet room for the past four days and would continue to do so for the next four weeks.
I thought about my website as I worked all day. Yes, I made five bucks. But did I really think it would work? Not really. In my mind, I thought that maybe, just maybe some richie would get a glimpse of it and give me a large sum of money, maybe someone who had once been in my position. To me it was a joke. It was funny. It was kind of fun to poke fun at myself and the cheap-ass life that I was now living. Especially in the Daily Bucks.
Friday, June 28, 2002
Today I answered an ad that I saw in the Wanted section on Craigslist. Some guy was looking for a fake Rolex. He collects them. I just happened to have one fake Rolex and two fake Cartiers. He is going to take them all, and pay me $50!
Over the next few days I received about fifteen e-mails or so, from different people than the original twelve, so I knew that they were forwarding it to their friends. Like my initial response, some people were nice, and others were mean. I got a couple of e-mails from people telling me that they were going to mail me money, which was cool! And I got some other e-mails from people telling me to drop dead. One guy wrote, “Given the viral nature of the
Web, I am sure you will likely succeed in convincing many to give up their cash.” I hoped he was right. Another woman offered me a “free session of spiritual energy healing” that she said would help me reduce anxiety and help bring insight into why I spent so much in the first place. So I was already coming out the price of one Reiki session ahead!
Since I had been busy at work, I didn’t have a chance to figure out how I was going to publicize my website. I didn’t know how people got others to visit a website. So I just made sure to respond to everyone’s e-mail. Mean or nice, they got a response—a chipper response. I always made sure I was friendly. I always made sure I asked them to send the link to all their friends, and then I just crossed my fingers and hoped they would.
Aside from my initial Craigslist posting, the only other way that I think people were finding my website was through my eBay auctions. You can create this thing on eBay called an About Me page that basically tells a little bit about you and summarizes your current auctions. At the bottom of the page, there is a place where you can link your favorite websites. So I used my About Me page to tell people about my new website and provided a link at the bottom. I was hoping that normal eBay users that were looking at my auctions would also visit my website.
Saturday, June 29, 2002
My cat peed on my bed last night. Fucker. Don’t know why. I’m going to have a talk with him later. I needed new sheets because you know how cat pee smells. So I took a shirt that my mom bought me that I never wore and returned it to the store that she bought it at and exchanged it for some new sheets. Sheets can be expensive…
After that I checked my PMB box and didn’t get any mail, but I had just launched my website, so I tried not to get too down on myself. It might take a while.
Before I knew it, it was already Sunday, which meant it was time to list another Big Ticket Item. After going through my closet, I decided to part with my burgundy Gucci sunglasses—the pair that I’d bought right when I moved to New York during my first trip to Bloomingdale’s. As sad as it was to part with them, it had to be done.
By the end of the week, I had received 174 hits and $6. Well, really I received $5, but I decided to count the dollar that I’d sent myself during my test as a donation. So as it stood after Week 1, my Grand Debt Tally was…
$20,221.40 TOTAL DEBT June 23, 2002
- $90.35 my money
- $5.22 your money
- $68.47 eBay sales
$20,057.36 TOTAL DEBT June 30, 2002—WEEK 1
WEEK 2: GOING HUNGRY
I wanted to make sure that I was completely honest about what I did with the money I received. If I said I was using it to pay my bills, then I was going to use it to pay my bills. The thing was, I didn’t even know if what I was doing was legal. I didn’t check with anyone. And the last thing I wanted to do was to get in trouble for misleading people. So like I said I would, I used the money that I received to pay off my debt. The cool thing about PayPal was that they offered a service called Bill Pay, which meant that I sent the money in my PayPal account directly to certain creditors—Discover Card being one of them. So, since the woman who won my Prada boots paid using PayPal, and Nicole sent me her $5 through PayPal, I had already made a payment to Discover.
Monday, July 1, 2002
Today I drank some really bad instant coffee that I found in the back of a random cabinet at work. I mean it was REALLY REALLY bad…Not just your average run-of-the-mill bad, but REALLY REALLY bad. You really have no idea. I figure I saved at least 3 bucks. It was BAD bad.
The bad thing was that I was still broke. So, while at work trying to focus on dogs and weddings, all I could focus on was my growling stomach. The worst part about it all was that Randy showed up to work every day with a bag full of food that he got at a health food store on his way there. And once he arrived, he’d take all the food out of the bag and put it on a shelf in our office so I could stare at it all day. And our office was small—so small that not only could I not help but stare at it, I could smell it.
He had granola bars, sandwiches, fruit, juices—you name it—all just sitting on a shelf. In the middle of his mad gaggle of food was an apple that had been sitting there for almost a week. To me, it didn’t look like that apple was going anywhere. In fact, in my opinion it was about to go bad. So, while Randy left work for a few minutes to run an errand, I ate that apple. Yep. I scarfed it down, almost ate the core. And that night, I wrote about it on my website.
The next day I got e-mails from people calling me an apple thief, telling me that they weren’t going to give me money if I stole things. So, I fessed up to Randy about his apple, and he didn’t really seem to care, to be honest.
Tuesday, July 2, 2002
Today I ate a coworker’s apple. I saw it sitting on their desk at work for a couple of days now. It was going to go bad! If they ask where their apple went, I’ll just tell them that I bet the cleaning man threw it away because he doesn’t want mice in the building. UPDATE: I fessed up to eating the apple on Wednesday. The person really didn’t seem to care. And I bought them an apple of my own on Friday, but once again, they didn’t eat that apple either. So I brought it back home and ate it Saturday. I’M NOT A THIEF!
Anywho, as the week wore on I continued to get a few e-mails and even got five more bucks from a guy named Ryan. He said that he had his own problems with the plastic, and sending $5 to a stranger probably wouldn’t help. And he didn’t believe my karma theory either. He said the problem with that was that “too many assholes in the world had it too good.” He said the reason he was sending me the money was that my “site was so brilliant that he couldn’t resist.” Brilliant! Wow!
Wednesday, July 3, 2002
Today my cat barfed on my new sheets. (See Saturday, June 29th’s, Daily Buck to understand the story of the sheets.) I’m not gonna get new sheets again, because cat barf comes out of sheets. I can’t afford the $3 to wash them because I don’t get paid until Friday, so I just cleaned ’em up real good with some Woolite. No one will ever notice.
The hours at work were still crazy, so I had less time to figure out how I was going to promote my site. But I really felt like I needed to get the word out there. I thought about having stickers made and sticking them on light posts all over New York, but that just seemed like too much work, and it would cost money anyway. The only place that I knew of to advertise it online for free was Craigslist, so even though they told me not to, I posted my web address one more time, but this time in the Community section. I figured maybe they removed it last time because they didn’t think it was appropriate for the Wanted section. So after going through all the motions and posting it everywhere, I got another e-mail from them, saying, “We are trying to discourage this type of thing…can you please not post this?” Huh. Whatever.
Over the last week and a half, I was so poor and hadn’t been eating that I lost five pounds. Normally this would not be a good thing, but in my case, it was. I still hadn’t lost that extra Ananda/unemployed weight that I put on.
Allan and Diane next door had a barbecue for the Fourth of July. But I didn’t have anything to bring, so I didn’t go. I didn’t want to be that neighbor who showed up to the party with nothing and then eat all their food. They didn’t know that I was dirt poor, and I was too embarrassed to admit it. So I sat inside and listed a bunch of stuff on eBay. In addition to the Gucci sunglasses that I listed on Sunday, I added some lampshades, silk flowers, a leather day planner, and one of my all-time favorites: the movie Clueless on VHS.
When I was done, I did eventually join the barbecue, but I pretended like I wasn’t hungry. It was really hot out that day and I wore a denim skirt with a slit up the front and back, and the only undies that I had that were clean were hot-pink lace thong underwear—not exactly the kind of undies you want to be wearing while sitting outside on a hot day at a barbecue. While trying to climb over the short fence that separated our two yards, I accidentally tripped and one of my legs went flying in the air, giving everyon
e a wide-open pink-panty shot. People pretended not to see, but it was quite obvious that they had. Allan kept offering me food, and I finally did accept. So the pink-panty shot was worth it after all.
I had to work on Friday, and since I was freelance, I had to work Saturday too just so I could get paid for a full week because of the holiday. Aside from my unlimited-ride subway card that I used to get to work, I had $2 in my pocket to last me until I got my paycheck. So I ate one Ramen soup in a bowl thing for seventy-nine cents each day. That’s it. I hadn’t eaten one of those since college. And since I put lukewarm water in it instead of “hot scalding water” like they suggested, the dried peas that were supposed to soften didn’t. And I got a headache from the MSG. That night I found other cheap entertainment.
Friday, July 5, 2002
Let me just say that I LOVE magazines. There’s nothing quite like a new fresh Bazaar to enjoy on your train ride home from work. However, magazines can be quite expensive. And they are NOT something that should be purchased if you are watching your budget. These last few weeks have been difficult for me. There’s a new InStyle with Britney on the cover…a new Allure…too many to name. So tonight, I went to my local bookstore, plopped down in the corner, and read all of my favorite magazines for free. The more I read, the more money I saved. I even read the pricey European ones with the extra thick, glossy pages. Those are like $8. Fashion magazines are like therapy. They make me want to be a better person.