My deeply southern family raised me to never talk about money. We were poor, sometimes living in our car, and occasionally hungry. But we never said it out loud.
Now, as a single mother of three kids with significant medical needs, I’ve worked several jobs to pay for their childcare and healthcare.
Still, I ended up with $100,000 in debt. I was ashamed until I started talking about it with people in my life. My friends’ reactions were surprising — and ultimately brought us closer.
My family taught me that poverty was a state of mind
“Always broke but never poor” was spoken so often while I was growing up that it was almost a motto. But the truth was, at least four generations before mine would be qualified to call themselves members of the “working poor” class.
My family was neatly divided into two groups: those willing to admit that they were down and out, and those who pretended they were always flush. My parents were part of that latter group. They believed in keeping up middle-class appearances, even if the refrigerator was empty. I eventually fell into the same bucket.
I never learned how to manage money. The only thing I knew about financial well-being was that more money was better than less.
I found myself in debt as a single mom
As a single mom, I became an extreme penny pincher, always working multiple jobs and saving as much as I could.
I raised my kids in smaller apartments, made home-cooked meals, and took them on their first vacation when my oldest was 12. Even though my kids’ bills were high, I always found a way to pay them off.
That was until my daughter’s latest surgery set me back nearly $100,000. Up to the day I opened that medical bill, my way of dealing with debt had always been to sacrifice whatever I had to in order to pay it off as soon as possible.
But this was different. It would take years to nix it, no matter what I did.
I felt like I failed because of my debt
When I first accrued a large amount of debt, I felt like it was a personal failure — even though I knew intellectually that I didn’t create my children’s medical diagnoses. I also wasn’t responsible for the rising cost of childcare or for the fact that health insurance doesn’t fully cover medically necessary procedures.
Still, I kept my debt to myself and told no one. I feared judgment.
But the debt wasn’t going anywhere until I figured out how to address it. My family’s history with money made their potential tips unreliable. I had to look to my friends.
Talking about money changed everything
I nervously revealed my debt to my closest friends, and to my surprise, they had great advice to offer. Many shared that they’d been in similar positions or had even claimed bankruptcy.
Friend by friend, I not only figured out a payoff strategy, but I got a whole lesson in financial well-being that I’d missed out on by staying silent about finances for decades.
So, I decided to manage this bill differently from how I had managed others. I decided I’d pay it off in monthly installments, but also use some of my income to still have fun with my children.
I was stunned to discover that learning about my experience actually helped my friends, too.
The more honest I was, the stronger my friendships became
“How do we elevate each other if we don’t learn from each other’s experiences?” my friend Ashley said.
My pal, Kat, agreed. She said that after talking to me about how I was carrying my debt without sacrificing my joy to pay it off, she felt more confident about entering a payment plan for a necessary medical procedure that insurance refused to cover.
My friends Andrea and Jacqueline both said they try to avoid debt, as I did for years. They both also told me that they respected my decision not to let what I owed define my life.
I realized that hiding debt only makes us feel more alone. Sharing it helped me see how my friends would react to taboo news. I know better than to trust them to listen and not make snap judgments or look down on me.
It was scary to share, but taking the risk gave us the opportunity to learn from each other and improve our lives together.
