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‘I Shopped to Cope With Depression—And Racked Up $25K in Credit Card Debt.’


Trigger warning: This post contains descriptions of suicidal ideation.

Six years ago, on a freezing cold morning in Seoul, I made two major decisions. The first was that I wasn’t going to kill myself. And, since I figured I wouldn’t be dying any time soon, I thought I might also try to get myself out of the $25,000 in credit card debt I had amassed.

For roughly two years prior, I was mired in a stagnant, unrelenting depression. My friends and family back home assumed I was fine; I was working abroad, having new and exciting experiences, living with my first boyfriend, enjoying my life by all outward appearances. In reality, I rarely left my apartment. I had some part-time work, but often made excuses and didn’t show up. On the rare occasions I tried to be social, I’d end up feeling lonelier than when I was holed up in my dark bedroom. My only tether to the world was my boyfriend, who I both relied on heavily and deeply resented for allowing me to exist.

I also had credit cards.

Day after day, I’d follow the same routine. I’d wake up, brew a strong pot of coffee, open my laptop, and shop online. I’d spend hours browsing for different things to buy; clothes I’d never wear, household items I didn’t need, gifts for absolutely no one in particular.

Once my purchases were made and those confirmation emails landed in my inbox, I compulsively tracked my orders. When boxes arrived at the house, I actually felt something—happiness? Satisfaction? Pride for a job well done? Whatever it was, it was a welcome change from the emotional rigor mortis I felt the other 99 percent of the time. I was addicted to that feeling. Eventually, I didn’t even pause long enough to open the boxes I’d received before rushing back to my computer to make another purchase, nothingness nipping at my heels.



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Student Loan Debt: 6 Ways to Tackle It


She Makes Money Moves is a new podcast from Glamour and iHeartRadio. Hosted by Glamour editor in chief Samantha Barry, the podcast shares intimate, unscripted stories from women across the country along with advice from financial experts to help guide those women—and women everywhere—forward. Download a new episode every Tuesday, then visit glamour.com/money for an article like this, with more insights from that week’s expert.

Seven out of ten students take out loans to pay for college. But it’s women who carry the majority of outstanding student loan debt. We hold nearly two thirds of it, which translates to $890 billion. Yes, you read that right.

One of the reasons for this imbalance is that women pursue college degrees at higher rates than men do. To date, 56% of today’s college students are women. But even if those numbers were even, we would still leave school with more debt than men who also enroll. As of 2016, the average woman graduated with $2,700 in more debt than her male counterpart. And it’s even worse for black women. According to research, black women are racking up around $25,000 in student loans for their bachelor’s degree (compared with women in general, who on average owe $21,619).

This week’s guest on She Makes Money Moves is $285,000 in debt—with $274,000 being from student loans. To help her come up with a plan to chip away at it, Barry welcomed financial expert Farnoosh Torabi onto the podcast. Here she lets us in on six ways to start paying down your student loans.

Home in on the principal.

The best way to get out of any kind of debt quickly is to pay it off aggressively and chop down the principal. When you boost income, or get a lump sum of cash for your birthday or year-end bonus, precommit to putting at least 50% of that windfall of cash toward your debt to pay it down faster. Make sure you direct that extra payment toward the principal, not the interest, which is a common mistake.

Don’t derail.

If all you can afford is the minimum payment right now, don’t panic. But do be sure not to ever miss a student loan payment since there are no statute of limitations as to how far lenders can go to retrieve overdue payments. They can, for example, garnish your wages or take money out of your tax returns. It can get nasty. Not to mention a missed payment can put a big dent in your credit score and stain your credit report.

Peg payment to income.

If you have any federal student loans, you may be able to qualify for Income-Based Repayment (IBR), a government program that helps borrowers keep their loan payments capped based on their income and family size. For most qualifying borrowers, IBR loan payments will amount to less than 10% or 15% of their income.

Look into public support programs.

The Department of Education has also begun a program called Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), again, strictly for federal loan borrowers. If you work full-time for a “public service” employer such as a nonprofit, AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, the military, or a government agency, PLSF may forgive your remaining debt after 10 years of employment and making on-time payments. During this time the IBR plan can help make your loan payments affordable. (But be warned: According to reports, the Department of Education, headed by Secretary Betsy DeVos, has rejected 99% of applicants for these kinds of programs.)

Deduct it.

You can deduct the interest you paid on your student loan during the tax year from your taxable income—up to $2,500. This reduces your adjusted gross income, meaning that you’ll be taxed on a lower amount of money than you earned, allowing you to keep more of your salary.

Transfer the debt.

If you get an offer to open a private loan with a lower rate than your existing student loan, you may consider transferring the debt. But this is easier said than done. Transferring debt to a loan product with a lower rate will lower your monthly minimums, but you’ll need superb credit to qualify. A site like SoFi.com helps qualified borrowers refinance their student loans.

According to a survey by Fidelity, the sponsor of She Makes Money Moves, 80% of women aren’t talking about money with the people closest to them. Today Glamour invites you to the conversation: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, in the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and join us as we help women raise their voices and make money moves.



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Women Owe Almost $400 Billion More in Student Debt Than Men Do


Graduation season is upon us, and it’s a time of celebration across the nation. But a new report revealed that 7 out of 10 women will not just leave school this month with a diploma: over 70 percent will also have to pack up student debt as well.

New data released this month by the American Association of University Women finds that women owe around $2,700 more than men do at graduation. Crunch the numbers, and arrive at this stunner of a statistic: Women hold two-thirds of the $1.4 trillion in student loans in the United States. That’s $890 billion—still more than the GDP of Austria and Norway combined—and $400 billion more than men.

For at least the last decade, candidates for elected office have touted plans to make higher education more affordable, and progressive politicians have put forth bold policies to address the problem. But few have been explicit about its gender breakdown. Women bear a disproportionate brunt of the national student debt, and that has and continues to cost them billions in lost wealth and missed opportunities.

Of course, some of that burden stems from the fact that more women enroll in American universities than men do. At the undergraduate level, women account for 56 percent of all students. But even that number doesn’t explain the share of debt women owe. As AAUW Senior Vice President of Public Policy and Research Deborah Vagins notes, just one factor can explain the the stark differential: the wage gap.

We’ve insisted for decades now that women pursue advanced education, the better to secure good salaries and more skilled work. And that’s great, Vagins adds. But after graduation and at the federal level, the nation hasn’t done enough to ensure that those women are compensated at the same rates as men. The wage gap kicks in as soon as women enter the job market, which means that from the start, they have fewer resources to pay back loans, pay them off more slowly, and rack up more interest in the process. The effects snowball, Vagins suggests.

“All of this compounds and means they have more debt, they take longer to pay it off, and they struggle more with that debt,” she says.

Researchers estimate that women could soon owe over $1 trillion in student debt, a number that lower wages and other costs, like childcare, drives upward.

And because we know now that the issue of student debt is tied to pay inequities, it’s no surprise that the report confirms that African-American women, who make just 63 cents on the dollar, have it the hardest. For a few reasons, not least of which is that they’ve likely earned less in the jobs they did before school, black women graduate with $30,000 in debt, compared to $22,000 for white women and $19,500 for white men.

Researchers at AAUW estimate that women could soon owe over $1 trillion in student debt, a number that lower wages and other costs, like childcare, drives upward. Vagins adds that the chasm between what men and women owe has almost doubled since 2014. Believe it or not, families still save less for daughters than they do for sons. T. Rowe Price found that in 75 percent of households with just sons, parents prioritize college funds over retirement accounts. For parents that have daughters, that number hovers around 60 percent.

Vagins stresses that just as there’s not one root cause for all student debt, there isn’t one quick fix to solve it. Still, AAUW has some ideas. Elected officials can boost support for Pell Grants, so that fewer low-income students have to take out loans to start. And our representatives could act to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, a move that’s a decade overdue.

In an emailed statement to Glamour.com, Sen. Patty Murray, who serves in the chamber’s HELP Committee and has championed better access to more affordable education in the Senate, wrote that she remains “committed to addressing the rising costs of college, the unmanageable student loan debt, and the wage gap,” and added that she appreciated the fact that women have more debt and take more time to pay it off than men do. To that end, the AAUW recommends that universities open subsidized child care facilities on campuses, an acknowledgment that single mothers face costs that most men don’t.

But in the end, according to the AAUW, the best solution to the problem of the gender gap between male and female borrowers are the same ones that would close the wage gap: the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Pay Equity for All Act, state laws that would work with businesses to implement new recruitment standards aimed at hiring candidates, and business practices that retain women once they have children.

“We do not want to send the message that because of debt, women shouldn’t pursue their educational dreams,” Vagins says. “We just think it’s important that our representatives act. This level of debt affects all aspects of women’s lives; we need to be focused on that.”



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Stacey Abrams Is the American Dream. She's Also $200,000 In Debt.


Stacey Abrams is a woman who has always kept irons in the fire. She’s an Ivy League educated lawyer—Yale class of ‘99—and the writer of eight romance novels, all published under the pen name Selena Montgomery. She’s a business consultant and the co-founder of a beverage company that focuses on infants and toddlers. She’s the former Minority Leader of the Georgia General Assembly and the first Black woman to lead in the House of Representatives, where she served for a decade. Oh—and she’s currently running for governor of the Peach State. Suffice to say: She’s got a lot going on.

Yet, despite all the bona fides, boundary breaking, and her rising star status in state government, Abrams is far from immune to a problem that plagues a lot of people in America: crushing debt. In an essay she wrote for Fortune this week, the gubernatorial candidate opened up about the $50,000 in deferred taxes she owes the IRS as well as the more than $170,000 in credit card and student loan debt she’s trying to pay off.

“I am in debt, but I am not alone,” she wrote. “Debt is a millstone that weighs down more than three-quarters of Americans.” It’s also an issue that especially affects women, who hold an estimated two-thirds of student loan debt in the U.S., as well as 63% of credit card debt. But, as Abrams went on: “It should not—and cannot—be a disqualification for ambition.”

In her case: It hasn’t been. But that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been hard, and even sometimes humiliating. Glamour spoke to Abrams about making the choice to go out on a financial limb—and why even if it’s cost her, it’s been well worth it.

GLAMOUR: Debt is fairly normalized in our culture. But I think it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around $200,000. Can you explain how that came to be?

SA: I’ve always been very cognizant of how much time I’ve spent in my head weighing whether I can take chances or opportunities because of money, and sometimes because of my mistakes with money. I learned financial literacy by racking up credit card and student loan debt. I managed to pay off the credit card when I started practicing law in 1999.

But five years later I was back in debt again because my parents had the catastrophic experience of Hurricane Katrina, which wiped out the community in which they served as ministers. I became their primary source of income. A year later, they adopted my niece because my brother and his girlfriend weren’t able to care for their child, and that has also been my financial responsibility for the past 15 years. In order to pay for that, I had to defer my taxes. What I decided is: I can defer taxes. But I can’t defer cancer treatment for my parent, I can’t defer healthcare insurance, I can’t defer food and shelter for my niece.

Do you feel like there is a gendered element to those expectations that goes beyond family loyalty?

Women are often called upon to be the backbone. Not just in the moral and emotional way, but in a very real financial way. It’s often daughters who take in aging parents; it’s the moms and grandmas who take in children who need support. That’s not to diminish the role that men play, but for women—especially in Western culture—there’s an expectation that we’re responsible. When you layer that with the wealth gap and the income gap, we’re expected to do more but we know that we make less, and we have to cover more. And it winds up having a crippling effect of women’s access to power.

Can you also talk to me about how debt has affected you emotionally?

It’s been the constant conversation for me for the last 20 years. Every time I wanted to make a decision. Every time I wanted to make a leap. Deciding to run for office, I had to think about what that would mean for all of the people who rely on me—partly because I had to hope that I could continue to make up the difference. For me, the ‘side hustle’ has been a necessity. I’ve always had more obligations, and so I’ve had to find multiple ways to meet those responsibilities. I made the choice that I don’t want me niece or my parents to have to struggle and worry. They aren’t living anywhere near the lap of luxury. But I wanted to have them the stability of knowing that they didn’t have to struggle again, and always. So if that means taking on two responsibilities or doing another job: So be it.

Plus, I want wealth. I want more than income. People of color, women, people from marginalized communities—we’re not encouraged to seek wealth. I want to get to the place where my children, if I have them, do not have the same anxiety I had. I want them to have the freedom to risk and to fail, which you never have if you don’t have access to wealth.

Women seeking wealth is so often thought of as ‘greedy’ in a way that isn’t true for men, yet we also shame people for being poor. How have you witnessed that stigma?

When I started the New Georgia Project, I raised more than $3.5 million dollars in under seven months, which is a pretty hefty lift. I also managed a project that led to the registration of 86,000 people and we hired almost 800 people to make it happen. Yet, I have been dinged, several times, for the salary I was being paid, of $177,000. The implicit question is: Why didn’t you do it for less—or for free? I can’t imagine that any man at the head of a nonprofit, who achieved what we achieved, and raised the kind of money that we raised, would be asked that question.

There is this underlying question of how dare I seek or accept a salary of that level. And it’s tied to that sense that women should just do because it must be done—that it’s somehow ignoble to accept compensation. Or even worse, that there’s some avarice associated with wanting to be compensated for our work—and yet we’re also supposed to have that largesse in every other aspect of our lives.

What’s the financial advice you wish you would have been given earlier on in your own life?

That credit scores last forever. When I finished law school and had to start paying down credit card bills, I remember realizing that a $300 I’d spent on a television had wound up costing me $1000. I didn’t understand interest rates. I didn’t understand that Discover was not being nice to me when they just let me pay $15 a month. Because when you come from a lack of wealth and a lack of economic mobility, you don’t always know that no one is being nice to you.

You wrote that you’re on a repayment plan with the IRS. But right now you’re on a full-time campaign—what does that mean for your finances?

When you see someone running full-time for office, someone has to pay for their mortgage and their insurance. I’m a single woman. I don’t have a spouse who is supporting me. I do not have current employment. I wrote a book and luckily that income has supported my campaign. But I had to resign from my company. I resigned from the legislature. I haven’t had a steady paycheck in quite a while. If you’re running for office, you’re literally forfeiting your income to run.

The upside is, if you win, there will be a salary. But you do it because you want to help people. I want to be the person who delivers for families like my own a way out of this. I want to be the governor who says: I’ve been where you are. I’ve grappled with these issues issues; I have a brother who has struggled with addiction and mental illness; I know what it’s like to not know if you can afford to be treated for cancer, because had to help my father pay for cancer treatments. I know what it means to not go to the dentist because you don’t know if you can afford the bill, and then it turns into something else. I’ve been down there myself. But what that means is that I know the way out.

*This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Stacey Abrams is the author of Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change, which debuted April 24, 2018. She is currently running for governor of Georgia.



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