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"Debt” is a noun. It has never been used as a verb—”to debt.” But we’re going to coin it that way; it helps us distinguish such use of money from other types of spending and from secured loans. There are three kinds of debting: compulsive, problematic, and reasonable.
COMPULSIVE DEBTINO
Throw out all the psychological jargon you’ve heard about compulsion. Basically, a compulsion is simply an act that is repeated over and over. It’s motivated by an internal reason or set of masons, usually subconscious. Some compulsions are harmless, such as arranging pens on a desk or cans on a self in a certain order. Generally we think of them as no more than habits or personal preference, if we think of them at all.
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When a compulsion is harmful—serious drinking or overeating, for example—we try to deny that it’s a compulsion. We manufacture excuses for it “Hey, I work hard, and I need a couple of drinks to unwind . We minimize the destructive consequences : “So I’m carrying a few pounds too much, it’s no big deal, I’ll knock ‘em off by summers” We even claim that the consequences of our behavior are actually the cause of the behavior: “ I do this because my life is pressured, hard, and painful”—when in fact life has become pressured, hard, and painful because of what we do.
Barbara, a divorced dental technician, insisted that she had to charge her son’s new school clothes. He’d outgrown his old ones, and she didn’t have the money to pay for the new ones. She was absolutely right. He did need new clothes, and she didn’t have the money. But what she refused to see was why she didn’t have the money—because most of her discretionary income had to be used for payments on her two credit cards, her department store account, and a personal bank loan, which were already costing her a total of $325 per month. Types of Debt NEXT
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