Being indebted may cost you your integrity

And most of the time, you will not realize this until it is much too late

We live in a world of easy credit, in which people will let you buy almost anything now, and pay for it later. This fuels our consumer habits and culture, having come to feel as natural and innocuous as pulling out a phone to order dinner, or relieve boredom. This frictionless access is there when you check out online and they offer to let you pay over six months with NO INTEREST, or when you swipe a credit card at the grocery store to buy $7.00 worth of produce. It was glaringly obvious when I was at the store buying a new cell phone, and the sales clerk asked me if I would like to “Pay for the phone on my monthly bill,” despite the fact that the phone I was purchasing was under fifty dollars. People may laugh at my flip phone, but paying $45 to text and call everyone is pretty hard to beat.

Plenty of people may ask the point of railing against something that is free, like no interest payment plans. To be indebted to others is to be indentured. If you owe money to others, you are not truly free. All decisions are filtered through the knowledge, and your decisions are impacted by this. Countless people work at jobs they hate to pay for things that long ago stopped providing any excitement, which they are still paying off. I work with multiple people in this situation, and often have friends express thoughts along those lines, although they rarely connect the dots between owing money and being stuck.

Here is where I acknowledge that there are certain times when you may need to borrow money, such as for college or a house. It is a rare thing for someone to save up $300,000-800,000 to purchase a house, all while paying rent. I recognize this reality, and accept that some things in the world are not as I would like them to be. With that said, it seems that the most common method of buying a house is getting qualified for the largest loan possible, and then buying a house to fit that, leaving no wiggle room in their budget at all. On college, people take out as many loans as they are allowed, often paying for things outside of their education, such as housing or fun, and then are saddled with that debt for decades to come. While debt may be avoidable for certain, specific things, it should be minimized in every way possible. In college, have a job, pay for everything you can, and only use debt to pay for what you truly need. When we purchased our house, we took the amount we were qualified for, and then shopped for about 2/3 of that amount. Is our house the nicest house in the world? No, obviously not. Does it allow us to have a comfortable life, with comfortable finances? Absolutely it does.

If being at a job you did not like was the worst possible outcome of debt, it may not be a huge deal. Unfortunately, marriages are destroyed, homes lost, despair sets in, and lives are ruined by debt. While this may not happen to the majority of people who have debt, they are possible outcomes. With that said, there is one other aspect of debt that is far pernicious that these obvious outcomes. Most people probably do not even recognize the connection, or know it has happened, which makes it very dangerous. Those in debt have a much harder time maintaining their integrity.

Why are integrity and finances connected? Let me tell you a quick story.

I am blessed to have a job that not only pays well, allowing your Mother to stay home with you, but which I also enjoy. Instead of working for a large corporation, maximizing profits and being a cog in a soulless machine, I am lucky enough to work for an organization which mirrors the values I hold. I regularly do tasks at work that I can see benefit others, whether individually, or on a larger scale. Do days get long? Absolutely, but even at the end of a long day, I know what I was doing was not making money for some rich person, but trying to improve the lives of others, as well as their families.

Around the time I hit ten years at my organization, a shakeup of sorts happened. I had a choice to make, and it was probably one of the hardest moments of my life, mentally and morally. I was left with the choice of keeping my mouth shut and my job staying quite safe, or speaking up about some legitimate issues, telling the truth while risking my job. Imagine, for a moment, where I was, mentally. We had bought a house in the previous six months, with your Mother pregnant with another child. There I was, deciding whether to do what was morally correct, and risk losing the job I loved, or keep my head down, not actively participating in anything bad, but allowing it to continue; all to protect my job.

In the end, speaking up worked out, and changes at the organization were made to stop the issues. Overall, I would argue the organization is much stronger, as protections have been put into place to prevent anything similar from occurring in the future. This is all well and good, but at the time I was stressing about the issues, the future was unknown, and there was no way to predict the outcome.

I am not sharing this story to try to say, “Look at me, making the right choice.” It is quite the opposite. I fully recognize that if our circumstances had been different, what I chose to do may have also been different. If our family mortgage payment were $1200/month more, your Mother and I may not have felt comfortable enough to make the call, because any time without pay might have been disastrous. Without paying cash for our vehicles, we might have shied away from risking our mobility to do the right thing. To live within your means, and preferably with a large margin of error, is to buy yourself the freedom to do what is right. If we were at risk of losing our home or car, we may have had to make a different decision. It would have weighed on me, but more importantly, there would have been negative ramifications for all the people who benefit from the organization where I work.

Instead of making difficult decisions in the moment, you can make many little decisions each day: bring your lunch, cook at home, walk instead of waste gas, have a roommate, pay in cash. Each of these are fairly small and easy, but combined, can have quickly snowball into massive savings. This savings provides security and freedom, thus protecting your integrity. You will still need to choose to do what is right, but that choice is much easier with no sword hanging over you.

Love,
Dad