Admit the Problem

Coming to Your Senses, Acknowledging Slavery

Imagine if Visa or Mastercard sent me the following letter: "Dear Mr. Soaries, We're pleased to send you a brand-new credit card. It's still going to carry platinum privileges, but we're changing the name from Platinum to Slave. We know you'll enjoy using your new Slave Card. The best card you can have. Slave."

You get my point. Financial institutions don't send us "slave cards"; they send out gold or platinum cards. They would never use the term slave in any reference, and we would be understandably offended if they did. Instead we proudly whip out our gold card and hand it over to the cashier as if we're extra special instead of especially enslaved.

The first step for getting out of slavery must be identifying the reality of our condition. We must acknowledge that the truth of Proverbs applies to us: "The borrower is servant to the lender" (22:7b). The word translated as "servant" can also be accurately rendered as "slave." And the reality of our condition is that we are servants or slaves to our lenders. With this admission as our starting point, we can then begin to break the stranglehold of debt with a three-tiered approach.

In order to restore the cornerstone of your financial strength, you must start wearing 3-D glasses. You must identify and vigilantly monitor the three core components of financial enslavement: debt, delinquency, and deficit. These three elements often serve as barometers of an individual's or a family's financial health.

The levels of household debt threaten our ability to develop any meaningful wealth or to pass that wealth on to future generations. According to the Federal Reserve Board, about one- third of lower-income families spend more than 40 percent of their income on debt repayment, compared to 20 percent for moderate-income households and 14 percent for middle- income families.

Advocacy organization Demos reports, "Credit card debt continues to threaten the financial stability of many low- and middle-income families in the United States, hampering their ability to save and move up the economic ladder." Obviously, the riptide of consumer debt can reinforce one's inability to rise above it. The more your income is consumed by debt, the more you must borrow to pay for essentials such as food, mortgage or rent, utilities, and transportation. Each month digs the hole deeper, making it harder — but not impossible — to climb out of the hole and stand on solid ground.

Another snare, delinquency, emerges within this cycle when we cannot pay our bills on time. Late payments lower our credit scores, which in turn can cause us to pay higher interest rates even on strategically reasonable debt, such as mortgages. (Some people call this "good debt" because it is secured by an asset.) Late fees, higher interest rate penalties, and lower credit scores not only increase the amount of our debt but they usually discourage and dishearten our desire to fight. Looking for emotional comfort from our desperate situation, we may be tempted to spend, charge, or borrow even more. If we are serious about our fiscal freedom, we must commit to eliminating such delinquency. Simply put, this commitment honors our pledge to pay all of our bills on time.

Finally, we must get to the heart of the problem and change our attitudes and behavior. To be free of deficit living means we live within our means and eliminate the need to close our spending gaps by using high-interest credit cards or, even worse, alternative financial services such as payday loans, pawnshops, and rent-to-own schemes.

These three objectives represent the core of being dfree® and ensure lifelong freedom if pursued concurrently, consistently, and conscientiously.

As I learned when I decided to become free from financial slavery, a plethora of information is available for anyone who wants to learn about money and money management. Financial literacy programs, books, and information abound.

However, what's missing is a practical strategy that we can use to identify the false beliefs, inconsistent values, and harmful habits that have kept us locked in comfortable consumer prisons. Our greatest challenge these days is that we still have not recognized our status as economic slaves. This pervasive debt trap, with its slavery of owing money, spending money, and living above our means, is harder to address than the slavery of the past. Those individuals captured, brutalized, and brought to this country against their will over two centuries ago knew they were slaves. They knew the reality of their situation. Consequently, they could and did struggle against their slavery and pursue their freedom in a variety of ways.

The tragedy today is that we're reluctant to admit we're slaves. But unless we're willing to address the root of the problem, we will never experience the financial freedom that's available to us. The only way a sick person can get well is to first admit to being sick. If you're walking around coughing and sneezing and blowing your nose and insisting, "I'm all right — nothing's wrong with me," then your words are undermined by reality.

The only way a weak person can get strong is to admit to being weak. You'll notice in the Gospels when Jesus would encounter people who were sick or lame, he would often say, "Do you want to get well? What do you really want?" (see John 5:2 – 15). He wasn't being insulting or insensitive; he simply knew that the process must begin with individuals embracing the reality of their situation and wanting to change it.

Instead we bury the depth of our indebtedness with more purchases, another vacation, a new car, another loan. The idea that we would voluntarily become slaves is offensive to all of our sensibilities. But when we continue to spend what we don't have, charge what we don't need, and borrow more than we can repay, then we must call the problem what it is: slavery.

I know this firsthand. I was once enslaved to consumer debt. I couldn't even pay my federal income taxes. Consequently, the IRS garnisheed my...