Deep in debt, yet can’t stop spending? Write a blog

Her journal, bloggingawaydebt .com, is one of the dozens that have sprung up in recent years taking advantage of internet anonymity to reveal to strangers fiscal intimacies the authors might not tell their closest friends.

Like other debt bloggers, Tricia believes the exposure gives her the discipline to reduce her debt. “I think about this blog every time I’m in the store and something that I don’t need catches my eye,” she says.

A decade after the internet became a public stage, it is now peering into the really private stuff: personal finance.

The blogs open a homey and sometimes shockingly candid window on the day-to-day finances in a time of rising debt, failing mortgages and financial uncertainty. A blog called “Poorer Than You” describes the financial doings of a 20-year-old film-school dropout. On saveleighann.blogspot.com, Leigh Ann Fraley, 37, provides daily accounts of her escape from $19,947 in credit card debt.

“I teach people how to get out of debt for a living, but I couldn’t do it myself until I started the blog,” said Fraley, who conducts seminars in personal finance for a bank. “I started to write everything down, like, I saved 20 cents today by parking at a meter that still had time on it. I tell things I wouldn’t tell my family.”

A couple who call themselves the King and Queen of Debt started their his-and-hers blog, “We’re in Debt” (wereindebt.com). They owed $34,155.70 on their credit cards and an additional $120,000.

Like other bloggers, Tricia said she and her husband arrived at their debt not by financial crises but by regularly spending more money than they made, using credit offered freely by companies.

Tricia said her credit problems began in her school days, when she opened a Visa account. Since then, she has rarely made more than minimum payments. As credit card companies offered her more cards and deeper credit lines, her debt kept increasing and topped $37,000. Even as her credit card debt surpassed her annual income, she assumed to pay it off someday.

Keeping the blog, she said, has made her conscious of her spending. Though most of her readers are strangers, she worries about letting them down. “I know that if I use my credit card, I’ll have to go on there and say I used it. I’ve been wanting expensive TVs for quite some time, but every time I see them, I think about having to come on the blog and say I bought it. And I’m sure if I wasn’t blogging I’d already have it.”

Tricia said the comments she had gotten had been overwhelmingly supportive. But she acknowledges that the fear of censure can be useful as well.

“I feel embarrassed about it,” she said of her debt. “I try not to, though. I try to put a spin on it when I start to get too down. But now we have health insurance, we’re saving for retirement. We could’ve just been living on the edge, but not underneath.”