Your Debt Load, Net Worth, P&L & FICO
Rodney and Crystal knew they had a lot of debt but weren’t sure exactly how much.
So they took turns guessing, as I listened to them talk on their speaker phone.
“I’ve got to have at least forty-five or fifty,” said Crystal, as she tried to calculate her card balances in her head. “But I don’t know how much you’ve got,” she said to her husband.
“Well I definitely don’t have as much as you!” He replied with a chortle, “But I’m guessing thirty-something, maybe forty K.”
Unfortunately, neither one of them was even close.
These two clients would set one of the highest debt-load totals for non-business-related credit card debt for a couple that I’ve come across, with 27 accounts totaling more than $168,000, including multiple accounts with the same banks. And that didn’t include their home mortgage or car loans or any kind of student loans or medical debts.
“Wow.” They said at least three times each as we reviewed their long list of accounts one by one then totaled them all up. It turned out Crystal was carrying more than ninety thousand and Rodney had over $70K worth of debt.
They didn’t know their total debt load and they didn’t realize their monthly minimums totaled more than $4,000 a month.
“Don’t worry,” I consoled them. “You’re not alone. Some people know their numbers to the penny, but most folks underestimate how much debt they have. They never add everything up, or they lose track or they just stop looking.”
Fortunately, these two had solid incomes. But even so they were burning up most of it on minimum monthly payments and were using credit cards and falling further behind every month to keep up with their other living expenses. They were the financial equivalent of a “heart attack waiting to happen.”