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My So-Called FiLife: Dave Kansas
I owe much to debt.
Many of the major decisions in my life have revolved around that four-letter word. And I am actually grateful for it. Debt is much maligned, but it shouldn’t be. The willingness to take on debt can indicate faith in a better future.
Of course, you can believe too much.
My debt experience began (where else?) during my college years. In 1986, I applied to transfer from Macalester College in my hometown of St. Paul, Minn., to Columbia College in New York. Shockingly, I got in.
At Macalester, I had great financial aid – some scholarship money, a decent work-study job and an additional gig stocking shelves at Kowalski’s Grand Market (it looks a lot nicer these days). Debt wasn’t a big issue – I just had a small student loan.
At Columbia? The financial aid wasn’t so great. Even working several jobs, I still was looking at incurring mountains of student-loan debt.
So, naturally, I went to Columbia, which turned out to be a great choice.
In school, I started building some credit-card debt on top of my mounting student-loan debt, just for good measure. This began in earnest when I used plastic to buy a plane ticket to go home and watch the Minnesota Twins in their triumphant World Series run in 1987 (I still have the Homer Hanky.)
By the time I graduated in 1990, the debt load neared $30,000. This included the bill for my last semester of college, which I decided not to pay. You can’t pull that trick anymore. The class just behind me had to pre-pay each semester, whereas I merely had to close out the tab on the previous semester in order to register.
But I wasn’t finished. Instead of getting a job as an investment banker, I decided to try to become a singer in San Francisco. That didn’t exactly work out, so I returned to New York City and proceeded to live off my credit card until I became a part-time sportswriter for New York Newsday.
Through the next six years as a journalist, I put tiny little dents in my debt. I made the student-loan payments but could only tread water (at best) with the credit cards.
I started doing the math in early 1996. If I remained a reporter (I was then at The Wall Street Journal), it would take many years to pay off my debts. And my $4,500 bill for the last semester of college still hung out there. I was receiving letters from collections agencies on that front. While I had graduated, I couldn’t get my diploma until the bursar was made whole.
On my 29th birthday (March, 1996) I made a vow to become debt-free by the time I turned 30. That summer, a couple guys came along to recruit me to join an internet start-up that would focus on financial news. At first I was extremely skeptical. Leave The Wall Street Journal for something that didn’t yet exist? Sounded crazy. But then I started thinking: What if I could get a salary that would help me meet my goal? So, I began negotiating.
I ended up moving to the company, TheStreet.com, eventually becoming its editor-in-chief. Turned out to be a great move, and debt made me do it.
By Christmas of 1996 (three months ahead of schedule) I had paid everything off, including that last semester of college. Columbia’s former Dean of Students, Roger Lehecka, presented me my diploma over a modestly priced dish of rice-and-beans at a small Cuban diner called La Rosita (check out the great tables) .
Sadly, La Rosita’s gone. But the memory of conquering that debt mountain – and all the good things that flowed from that — is as fresh as ever.
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True about debt being a great motivator. But you also have to admit to a great degree of luck, in that Web sites were throwing money at print journalists in those years. Unlikely that a journo with $30k of debt these days could “conquer that debt mountain” in 8 months.
Entrepreneurship often beats journalism (or any paycheck) for the $$ — of course there’s nobody left to run the papers, but i think we’ve all realized that transparency isn’t all it’s cut up to be in the free markets anyway. “Biggest fish are in the muddiest waters” — the richest thrive where there is no transparency at all. Still I’d be sad if there were no WSJ — but I could never figure out how they live on $110 K in NYC — inheritances?
Super, it would be nice if most reporters in ny earned 110k, but it doesn’t quite work out that way. Many fellow scribes have roommates well into their 30’s, live in brooklyn or queens and/or pay far more than the generally-prescribed 25% of income for housing.
But this is where a lot of the good jobs are…
Debt is the American way; after the Revolution we were broke and owed about $70 million. And it’s gone downhill from there.
The fact that today, we are one of the most religious nations and earth, and probably the most indebted, is another one of those social contradictions that, depending on your bias, reveals either America’s glorious intellectual flexibility or its self-satisfied hypocrisy.
Meanwhile, the California just passed legislation which would ban credit card companies from using T-shirts and other promotional devices to market credit cards and public universities.
Fifteen states have already put limits on credit card marketing on college campuses, which shows the confidence they have in the math SAT scores of those they’ve admitted.
I’m convinced that if we were better consumers of debt, we’d force the banks to offer us better and more innovative credit opportunities. Right now, our financial institutions are playing an arbitrage game with our stupidity — and the spread is clearly in their favor.
Debt is Satan’s sharpest sword. Some are annointed by him to get Rich quick and to follow him. Others have to suffer like some presnet day home-owners soon to be foreclosed on. Remember: if you do not borrow, you cannot default. The Bible clearly dissuades borrowing.
