by Karyn Bosnak
IN ADDITION TO ALL THE PEOPLE I received money and kind words from during the week, more wackos started coming out of the woodwork too. Some crazy guy bid on my eBay items as a joke. He entered a top bid of $10,000, so anytime anyone else would bid, his bid would top theirs. Then he refused to pay after he won them all, so I had to relist everything.
I also started getting a lot of requests for advertisers. Since the goal was to pay off my debt, my initial response was to jump on the bandwagon and get as many as I could. But the more I thought about it, I decided not to. I didn’t want to sell out. If this actually worked, and I actually was able to pay off my debt from the kindness of strangers, then what a great story. People all over bonding together to help some random chick on the Internet get out of debt—that would say a lot about humanity. Also, I didn’t want a bunch of blinking advertising all over my site. I didn’t want to change a thing.
On Sunday, a woman from the New York Post came over to take pictures of me for the article. Since I still wanted to remain anonymous, I agreed to allow them to take photos only if they hid my face. So after talking with the photo editor of the paper, we came up with the idea to take all of the money that I had received and fan it out in front of my face. Both the reporter and she told me that the article would be fun, so I was game to play.
That day, the photographer asked me to get out all of my purses and shoes and stuff to cover myself with to add to the picture. And when I pulled them out, she asked me where the rest of it was.
“That’s it,” I said.
“That’s twenty thousand dollars’ worth of stuff?” she asked.
“Sadly, yes,” I said. “That compounded with eating out and getting your hair done equals twenty thousand dollars.” It was true. I had a lot of purses and shoes, but I didn’t have a lot of purses and shoes. I wasn’t Imelda Marcos or anything.
Later, as I was updating my site, I decided to apply the full amount of the money I received from my eBay sales to my debt and pay for the shipping on my own. So, if someone bought something for $50 and I charged them $10 for shipping, instead of applying just the $50 to my debt, I applied all $60 of it and paid for the shipping by myself. If I didn’t do this, then I would have started to take money out of PayPal and divvy it up and stuff, and I didn’t want to do that. So, I actually paid more each week than what it looked like.
That week, I received 44,585 hits and $455 in donations. I didn’t think it could get any better or any bigger. I had no idea that it would. I found that while I could use the Daily Buck to be fun and silly, I could use the weekly update to be more serious and heartfelt. That week after telling everyone the website stats, I added:
From me to you, things have been really weird this last week. I really didn’t think anyone would go to my low-budget website initially. I’ve gotten money, which is great because it is what I asked for. But more than that, I’ve gotten letters and e-mails from people who have been, or are currently, in the same situation as me.
Debt sucks for sure. It makes you feel bad about yourself because it’s an idiotic thing to do, and you know that you are the one responsible for doing it. Whether it be lack of self-control or an emergency that landed you in debt, it’s embarrassing. For me, the most embarrassing part of this ordeal isn’t the fact that I’m asking you to give me a dollar—heck, that’s the easy part! It was actually admitting that I owed the $20,000. I felt like I was the only person in the world who could have done something this stupid. But I AM NOT ALONE. And to all the people who e-mailed me and are in the same situation, YOU ARE NOT ALONE either!
And one more thing, you know what’s amazing? All of these people that gave me a dollar…they don’t know me. They just decided to help out some anonymous girl on the Internet who maybe made them laugh for a few minutes. Thank you! I love this world because people like you exist in it. It makes all the badness go away, even if for just one moment…So until next week…peace!
$19,533.72 TOTAL DEBT July 14, 2002
-$432.00 my money
-$455.95 your money
-$214.72 eBay sales
$18,431.05 TOTAL DEBT July 21, 2002—WEEK 4
WEEK 5: THE DEATH OF CLAIRE
On Monday, Business Week came out and I started getting a different kind of e-mail because the people who read Business Week were businesspeople, I assumed. A lot of them sent money as well, but it was to celebrate my “entrepreneurial attitude” and “great marketing ability.”
Dying to see the article, I ran to a bookstore during lunch, and there on page 12, in a section called Shopaholics, was a color photo of the Grand Debt Tally page of my website in the middle of an article titled “Sister Can You Spare Me a Buck?” It was short, but it was still positive. The article ended saying:
Not all the responses have been kind. Karyn says half her e-mail is critical. “I didn’t hurt anyone by spending too much money,” she protests. “I was actually helping out the economy.” She has a point. Consumer spending, which grew 3.1% in 2001, helped prevent the economy from cratering.
Aha! I’d made that part up about helping out the economy! It just sounded good. Good to find out it was true! I bought four copies and went back to work. I planned on telling my parents eventually, and I’m sure they would want a copy, so that’s why I bought so many.
Later that day I spoke with the Wall Street Journal guy, who told me that they would not do a story without a last name, so they didn’t do a story. I didn’t mind, though, because I was going to be in the New York Post on Tuesday and the New York Times on Thursday.
It really was hard to work because what was going on was so exciting! I sat at my desk and tried to concentrate on Cherry and her mom scoping out places to have their doggie wedding, but I just couldn’t. And I could see that Randy was kind of getting irritated so I focused to the best of my ability.
That night I decided to tell my mother. I called her on the phone after work and swore her to secrecy. And as I expected, she wasn’t too worried about the debt, and thought the website was hilarious.
“People owe that much money on a car,” she said.
“I know, but I don’t have a car, Mom,” I said.
“I know, but you are going to be okay,” she said. “Grandma told me.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. “I wouldn’t lie about that. When are you going to tell your father?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m afraid.”
“Well,” she said, “I do agree that he probably won’t be happy about the debt. But I do know he would find the website funny as well.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You better tell him before it hits a Chicago paper that he reads,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “I will.”
Later that night, I kept updating my site. I added more Daily Bucks…
Monday, July 22, 2002
Today I stole the top off of some girl’s water bottle at work because I lost mine. She’s one of those girls who throws her bottle away when she’s done, one of those girls I USED to be. Except she wears her sunglasses at her desk and I would never do that. Because I stopped buying bottled water and have been refilling my bottle from the Brita, the top is really important. The top helps me get the water from home to work. The top helps me to not spill my water on every pedestrian on the train. Since I’ve been reusing this bottle for about two weeks, the top has saved me about $28. So I really needed the top. And I bet she didn’t even notice hers was gone. (See Tuesday, July 9th’s, Daily Buck for the story behind the Brita.)
And I added more Me-MAILs…
DATE: July 18, 2002
FROM: Stan
TO: Karyn
SUBJECT: My DVD addiction sent me into credit card hell, and I am still there
Hi, my name is Stan, and I owe $1,400 to Mastercard. There I said it and I feel better :)
I have been buying DVDs almost every week for the last 5 months. My DVD shelf has begun to dwarf a small chi
ld, and I am worried it will soon overflow and consume my very being. It all began with my love of movies, a movie here and a movie there. Some of my favorites at first, and then movies I didn’t like a whole lot, but felt I needed anyway. Then the problem took a nasty turn as I investigated movies I HAD NEVER SEEN BEFORE, but had to have.
I have 15 DVDs on order right now, with no hope of paying for them. I truthfully cannot stop. I would donate a dollar to your cause, but I can’t even donate enough to my credit card bill! I have begun contemplating selling off…my Stanley Kubrick collection, the crown jewel of my collection. I don’t know if you are into movies or not, but this is the big momma of DVD collections, it has Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut, The Shining, 2001 Space Odyssey…I am getting teary-eyed thinking of losing it right now.
Well, just thought I would let you know that there are other 20-somethings who have serious debt problems. Any advice as to how to stop the downward spiral?
Thanks,
Stan
FROM: Karyn
TO: Stan
SUBJECT: Re: My DVD addiction sent me into credit card hell, and I am still there
Dear Stan,
I am sorry to hear about your addiction to DVDs. I don’t know too much about DVD addiction, but I’m guessing it could get really ugly. I feel your pain.
If it makes you feel better, I too had a horrible addiction that I had to overcome. Even saying the word sends shivers up my spine…so I am gonna whisper it to you…shh…I was addicted to…lip gloss. There I said it. I, STAN, WAS ADDICTED TO LIP GLOSS. Gosh, it pains me just to think about it. There was Mac, Givenchy, Prescriptives (the mother lode!), T. LeClerc, Nars, Bobbi Brown—the list goes on. I even bought Bonnie Bell once or twice. But I over came it, and you can too.
Stan, I have received hundreds of e-mails from 20-something s just like us indebt. So, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. And $1,400 is not that bad. Just don’t let it get any higher and start paying it back now.
What I am about to suggest may sound crazy, but I ask you to please NOT press the back button on your browser. I think that you should sell all of your DVDs. Even the Stanley Kubrick collection. You may find something strangely satisfying about not having any of those damn DVDs around to clog up your thinking space.
However, I am NOT really in the position of giving advice. After all, I am a woman who ran up $20,000 in debt by buying a bunch of designer crap.
Take it one day at a time, Stan, baby steps…baby steps…it’ll be okay…
Karyn
And sometime around three in the morning, I did an interview with a reporter from the Sunday Herald Sun in Melbourne, Australia, which was the second largest national newspaper in Australia. I was exhausted!
On Tuesday, I woke up at 7:30 and rushed to the corner store to get myself a New York Post! And wouldn’t you know it? The deliveryman was late! So I took a shower and left for work, and checked again on my way to the subway. And still nothing.
I hopped on the train and worried the entire way to work. Despite covering my face with singles, I’m sure people that knew me would be able to figure out that it was me, and for that reason alone I wanted the article to be friendly.
I finally arrived and stopped by a newsstand to pick up a copy. Flipping through the paper I finally found the story. And oh my gosh! It was in color and was located on the cover of the New York Pulse section—which is like the cool entertainment section of the paper. Past all the news and stuff! It’s the part that I read! It was the entire page!
In big bold letters it said “Angel of Debt: Damsel in distress seeks $20K bailout from strangers.” This is why I like the New York Post! Could they make me sound any more desperate!? It was purely brilliant! In addition to the picture and the title, they had a week in the life at the bottom of the newspaper that they pulled from my Daily Bucks, and also had a rough breakdown of where all the money went.
Later that day I showed Randy, who agreed that it was a great article. The e-mails started pouring in, and I found out that the San Francisco Chronicle had also run a short story that day saying:
A lot of people will be infuriated that the creator of www.savekaryn.com has $20,000 worth of credit card debt and is begging for others to bail her out. More will be infuriated because they didn’t think of it first.
And USA Today also ran the same thing that was on their website in their newspaper. So there in the Life section underneath the Muppets again was the small blurb about my website. But this time it had a title that read “From Kermit to Karyn: It’s not easy being green, or in the red.” I wanted to just die! It was so exciting!
By noon, I had so many e-mails that I didn’t know what to do. And people I knew in New York were starting to call me after they read the Post, just to “See what’s up.” They pretty much figured it was me, but wouldn’t say anything. They were waiting for me to spill the beans, but I didn’t. The anonymity thing, which I’d started to ward off the wackos and throw off my parents, seemed to create more excitement. So I just kept going with it.
Later that afternoon, I got an e-mail from Good Morning America asking me to be a guest and talk to Diane Sawyer. After thinking about it for a while, I said no. Yes, it would be great publicity. But I kind of felt like it was just too early to “come out of the closet,” so to speak. I was in the New York Post and would be in the New York Times on Thursday, but I just felt like maybe I should wait to reveal myself until the debt was paid off or something.
The Sony pictures guy called after seeing the story in the Post and loved it. I also got a few e-mails from publishers and literary agents asking me if I’d thought about writing a book. I had, but I didn’t know what I needed to do.
So I called my friend Jodi. Jodi was the girl I worked with at Curtis Court who was also in the Futures department at Ananda. When the show got canceled she became an agent, and she worked at an agency that mostly represented sportscasters but also had a television department and a literary department. I called her up and told her the whole story. I didn’t know what to do about the Sony guy, the publishing inquiries—none of it. So I made an appointment to meet with her on Thursday.
By the end of the day, the reporter who wrote the story for the New York Times called to tell me that they pushed it from running on Thursday to running on Sunday. I was going to be in the Sunday New York Times. Oh my gosh. I couldn’t believe it!
I was so overwhelmed with the responses I was getting. Every day I didn’t think it could get bigger than it was getting. And I started to feel unworthy about what was happening. I started to believe that maybe I didn’t deserve all the attention, and at this point the praise that I seemed to be getting in every article. I felt that despite the website being what it was, people expected the girl behind it to have her shit together, and I didn’t. I kind of felt like a fake, like I was pretending to be on top of the world, but I wasn’t. And I thought that at any moment, everything was going to come crashing down around me. Somehow people would realize that I wasn’t as funny or as fabulous as I was appearing to be. I felt like any moment someone was going to take it all away from me and tell me that I didn’t deserve it. I felt like I didn’t deserve something good to happen to me.
And after thinking about it, I felt this way because I owed all that money. I started to realize how much I had beat myself inside for the last year for being that far in debt. The truth was that I hadn’t gone out in about a year. I had completely stopped living. And not just because of the money. There are free things that I could do in New York. The truth is, I had denied myself because I felt like I was inadequate. My self-esteem had gotten so low that I didn’t think anyone would ever like me—both just as a person and romantically. And if they did like me, then something was wrong with them because I was a loser. That’s what I felt. So these same self-doubts were nagging at me now too, telling me that I was still a loser and that once people realized it, it would all end.
So to make sure that didn’t happen, every night I worked until three in the morni
ng or so to keep my website up-to-date.
Tuesday, July 23, 2002
Today I ate dry toast for breakfast due to lack of butter and jam in the fridge. It got stuck on the way down and kind of made me “hiccup” a bit.
Wednesday, July 24, 2002
Today I fell off the wagon and ate Taco Bell and Hostess Cupcakes for lunch. I spent $7.
But I choose to look at it in a more positive manner. By giving in to my temptation, I am giving myself something to write about in my journal for the PMS study. This entry alone will show the ladies who run the study that I have REALLY, REALLY bad PMS, rather than just REGULAR bad PMS. Once they realize this, they will no doubt accept me to study and I’ll make $500.
So if you subtract my splurge today, I still come out $493 ahead. Oh, and I also got really cranky with the dude I work with. That’s one more step toward PMS study acceptance. (See June 26th’s Daily Buck for the story behind the PMS study.)
Thursday, July 25, 2002
Tonight I decided to explore the condiments in my fridge, and found some spray butter. I also found some soy cheese that’s been hiding in the butter compartment for months now. To me, that equals grilled cheese. Kick butt.
I had to take the top off the butter and dab it on in spots around the bread because there wasn’t a lot left. When I grilled the sandwich, only those spots turned brown. But the fake cheese melted really nice.
On Thursday, I was a guest on five more radio shows, as well as a call-in guest on a show called Curtis & Kuby on MSNBC and Fox 5 News at 10 P.M. in New York. I met with Jodi and the literary agent at her company named Jennifer to talk about the possibility of writing a book. I told them both about the movie people, and they told me that if it came down to it to not sign anything before talking to them. Another high note of the day was that my Winning in the Cash Flow Business program sold for $70!