How did I get in so much debt

Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.

I've always carried a bit of credit card debt but usually only a couple of thousand dollars. I'd look at people owing tens of thousands of dollars and just be confused at how you could possible get that far in debt. Who gives you money, what do you spend it on how does this happen? Well let me tell you how it happened for me. It was the result of 3 things. Bad decisions, Poor planning, excessive shopping, and bad luck. Though to be honest the last one wouldn't have mattered if not for the first three which are about 95% of the problem.

My descent into debt started around 7 years ago. I got an American Express card for my personal business. I was planning a new project at the time around digital picture frames. I looked at a lot of options for parts and settled on low end Lenovo tablets as my platform base. I then decided that instead of buying one or two I would buy 15 of them. This was done for two reasons. The first is I wanted stock if they sold and secondly it unlocked 150k bonus amex points if I spent $5k in the first 3 months. Bad decision and poor planning! That project was cancelled and for years I had to drag around a bunch of unopened tablet boxes until finally I decided to put them all into the electronics recycling bin.

After that I carried that balance for a while spending up to my income and paying off just the minimum which meant the balance never really went down. Over time with other company spending on books, server fees, courses, equipment, furniture for my office etc I eventually grew the balance to around $11k. It was a gradual increase but I was making the minimum payments and not really considering the interest expenses.

Next up was a personal credit card which I got to buy some exercise equipment and furniture. This one quickly maxed out at $5k from that and again I just kept paying the minimums. Bad decision and poor planning!

This stayed steady for a few years. Eventually added to that was a zip money account to get some more exercise equipment and random stuff for around the house. Over the next two years this filled up as well so now I was $20k in debt.

At this point I got my first loan and consolidated all of these into one lower interest loan. This was a bad decision because I didn't close the accounts off once they were consolidated so now I had $20k in debt in a loan and $20k in available balance. This is a danger zone for me and something that has repeated twice.

Gradually through random extra spending on cards on who knows what really. Books, gadgets, furniture, nights out, etc. I'd once again maxed out my other cards. I also doubled my available balance on my personal credit card to $10k and during this time purchased a new macbook pro.

So at this point we have the $20k loan that is down to around $15k and another $25k in cards and zip.

At this point I split from my partner and needed to move cities and my previous real estate was holding up our deposit so I ended up taking out another loan to pay for moving costs($1000 on repairs, cleaning etc for the old house, $7000 straight moving fees(storage units, moving companies), $4000 for the deposit on my new place and a handful of other related costs adding up to around $15000). I took out a new loan to cover these costs. This was mostly bad planning and bad luck. But without the bad planning I should have easily had the money available to cover these costs without debt so really just bad planning.

At this point we are at around $60k. About $50k of that over 2 years. The last $20k came within a year. A combination of much less disposable income due to ballooning interest payments, another move when my landlord decided he wanted to sell my house, more poor purchasing decisions and a new work computer.

At present as mentioned I have a single loan, the two cards and zip to pay off. The debt is high but the monthly payments are still only around 10% of my net income so with some better decision making, reduced spending on wants I expect I'll be able to make significant progress on paying this down in the next year.

This whole post has been mortifying to write. Most everyone I know personally knows I'm not the best with money. To truely lay out all my stupid and silly decisions to get where I'm at now has certainly been embarrassing but the first step to getting better is admitting I have a problem and here we are.

Shopping has definitely had a huge impact on my debt as well. I will often find myself bored and on amazon or another online store buying random stuff for my house that I maybe need maybe don't need. I also have a nasty habit of buying big ticket items with little concern for the fact that I am paying for them with debt. A few examples of this are.

As you can see thats almost $20,000 in spending on just random things I thought of off the top of my head. This is certainly not everything I've bought that was over $500 during this time period and its also not everything I've bought and almost never used. I have drawers and cabinets full of things I bought on a whim because I definitely needed it only for it to get put away and never looked at again. A few things I've since sold on marketplace and I plan to offload everything else I'm not using over the next year with all money from sales going straight to debt payments.

You can now hopefully see the amount of savings something like a no spend year can have on me and the difference it will make in paying off my debts.