Drowning in Debt
by Deborah Copaken Kogan
In spring of 1995, when our first child was born, my husband and I were swimming down the river of our lives, heads held high. We owned a small apartment. We were paying off our student loans. We went out to dinner on occasion and put money in a 401(k). We believed in the American dream.
Today, no longer the owners of anything except our fraying furniture and clothes, we are drowning. In fact, I'm squeezing in the writing of this essay between searching for a cheaper rental for our family of five, dealing with my first cavity in 42 years of having teeth, and applying for a job in finance—yes, me, an Emmy Award–winning journalist with two decades of experience under my belt. Or, actually, I'll take a job in any field that offers good health and dental benefits and doesn't involve the trading of sex for money—although really, why set limits?
Last year we earned what would be considered a decent living anywhere else in the U.S. Yes, we put down roots in New York City—where it takes $123,000 a year, according to a recent study by the Center for an Urban Future, to be considered middle class—but in every other way we are frugal to a fault. We do not own a car. We buy our clothes at Old Navy or wear hand-me-downs. We live, all five of us—at least until we're evicted—in a two-bedroom rental with a five-by-seven-foot room off the kitchen. We cook our own food and mend our own clothes and ride public transport nearly always. I even buy my underwear at the drugstore: Hanes for Her, in packs of three.
And yet here we are: $30,000 in debt and counting. As I reconstruct the path from there to here, some key moments stand out, both personal and societal: the day our children's sitter, whose salary we could ill afford on top of preschool, was poached by a corporate lawyer who offered her twice what we paid her annually plus overtime; the weeks following 9/11, when my husband's business collapsed and we sold our apartment to pay our debts; the night when our friend, a well-remunerated investment banker, announced he was leaving his job to join a hedge fund because he didn't want to be "just another $500,000-a-year schmuck"; the morning last November when my husband called the hospital room where my father lay dying to tell me he, like 2.6 million other Americans in 2008, had lost his job, leaving us with no health insurance.
The crazy part is that the story of my drowning family is hardly unique. The dirty little secret of American capitalism is that, left unfettered, it doesn't work. We have no safety net when one parent loses his job. Our child-care and health-care costs are not subsidized by the government, as they are in nearly every other industrialized country in the world. Our middle class has been decimated. I no longer have the luxury of believing in the American dream. I'm too busy living its nightmare.
Next Page: "An Open Marriage"
