by Ana Choi

Created on: August 29, 2008

Debts affect our emotional well-being in many ways however it goes both ways, for emotional stability or instability also affects our financial decisions and practices which in turn can lead us to debt.

Sometimes debts are but a wake-up call and a teacher in disguise in many areas of your life, not only financial but also emotional. I am a single woman in her early 30's with no house, a second-hand car, a rented apartment, with practically no money saved in her bank account and with payments for loans that cover 3/4 of my salary but even so this is one of my best years managing my debts because right now I am a year away from being completely free from the original $35K debt I had started with. In my worst days, I could only count on $20 to feed myself the whole week and no money for gasoline, I lived to pay off debtors instead of living to pay for things I would really enjoy like taking a few days off to go to the beach. How did I get this messed up and why?

My reasons are resumed to lack emotional well-being, lack of foresight, lack of goals in life, lack of self-assurance and a big emotional hole in my heart: loneliness, grief, and depression, addiction to gambling and shopping and believing in the wrong people along the way. However all of these were manageable and repressed because I when you have the money or the work that can pay your extravagances, in my case I had a well-paid job and plenty of high-limit credit cards. I tried to cover the emptiness that I felt in many ways: eating, shopping online and in stores, inviting friends, gambling freely, giving money freely and believing in "paying" for rituals that would help me see the "light" in my life I would do anything with money or with its plastic counterpart that would give me an instant high somehow. I can't deny that going shopping and buying whatever I didn't need without even looking at the price would give me a high whenever I swiped the card. As well as the high gambling would give me in order to contrast all the other feelings of inadequacy and feeling unloved, hey at least I would derive a "high" and that was always better than a "down". Food was also a problem I would never cook, always eat out and that also accumulated into debt. At the time I also believed that people, "powerful" psychics could "charm" my way back to love and ease me the life that I wanted by paying them for expensive rituals, cleansings and protections and other services. I lived this kind of life for 5 years which accumulated

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