History of a Bad Spender, Part 3 of 5

In March of 2006, I used the last of our tax return money to buy more inventory, pay our mortgage, take a trip to southern California for a “direct sales leadership summit,” and used what was left to pay what I could of the credit card bills. I’d borrow from one debt to pay another, just to get by. And, by then, there was nothing left to pay the B of A loan.

The stress of it all was beginning to take a toll on my nerves and my marriage. In addition to working full-time, I was also gone twice a week to do shows, constantly on the phone trying to book more business, and leaving much of the parenting of our son to my husband. Another activity that I had added to my calendar was coming home at lunch time to erase collection messages off of our answering machine and to check the mailbox in case a credit card or bank statement inadvertently made its way to our home address.

In the mean time, I hadn’t phoned any of the creditors back and tried to ignore the issue. What I didn’t know was that, if the callers were ignored long enough, they would track down any other person associated with the debt and begin to do searches for their phone numbers. Which is how my husband began to find out about some of the debt that I was hiding.

He’d call me at work and say he’d received a call from “XYZ” card, informing him that not only did we have a high balance, but our payment was also late. I would say something like, “Oh, yeah, something happened with the online billing and it didn’t get there in time . . .,” or make up some other excuse. Then, we’d fight about having debt, he’d threaten to take over bill-paying, not speak to each other for a couple of days, and after a while, everything would go back to normal.

Things were different, though, when he discovered the B of A loan.

“Thirty THOUSAND dollars?,” he asked.

I was busted.

So, I came clean about that one particular debt, leaving the others unmentioned because he never asked the question, “Is this the last one?” But I knew I needed to do something to get some of them paid and keep our mortgage current, or else things were going to get really bad. (As if they weren’t already bad enough.)

Then, I got an idea so sinister in nature that I couldn’t sleep for three days. But I was desperate, which may explain why I could ever do something so immoral and unthinkable: I obtained the login and password for my husband’s retirement account and withdrew it. All of $43,000 of it.

He never accessed the account – it was left over from a prior job and he kept putting off rolling it into his new 401(k) plan. He also kept forgetting to find the paperwork to log on, which is how I knew I could skirt the issue if it ever came up. And I knew, eventually, it was going to come up, since I had also planned to not report the early withdraw to the IRS.

I used the money to pay mortgage arrears, another set of credit card payments (but never really paid anything off). I also continued to buy unnecessary inventory for my business. And, by the end of 2006, the money was gone, I was pregnant, and wondering how we would keep up on the house payments.