A monkey off their back

"It took me a while to really ... stop and think, OK, how much do I have to spend on a new suit for work?" Canady says in a phone interview. "There was this sort of awakening of, 'I have to do better at this,' but ... it didn't happen overnight. There were still plenty of months where I'd spend too much in one area and be pinching pennies to do laundry."

A few years into it, Canady mustered the discipline to pay for Christmas presents entirely in cash. "I spent less on gifts, but I didn't spend more than I had."

He says his biggest mistake was not disclosing his debts before getting married a year ago. His wife had neglected to mention several thousand dollars of her own debt, too. Once they got past the fight that erupted when they found out, they started working together to erase the red ink as fast as they could.

Now working as a youth minister in Washington, D.C., Canady says he's just 18 months shy of having it all paid off. "I've got all the credit-card statements that say zero balance. I'm thinking about framing them in a montage or something, to say it's possible to get out."

Owing roughly $100,000 was not Susan's biggest problem. Underlying her distress was the shame of not being able to support herself and her daughter, despite having a doctorate and nursing and medical degrees.

"I was a mess," says Susan (not her real name) in a phone interview from Los Angeles. "I borrowed money - from individuals and from student loans - with no idea how I'd pay them back."

The debt and the shame drove her into drug use and isolation. When she was on the verge of suicide, her therapist - whom she hadn't paid for a year - insisted she attend a Debtors Anonymous meeting. "I went to DA and I was amazed, because there were people there who were telling my story," Susan says. "I took some very simple steps: I started writing my money down - what I spent, what I brought in.... And bit by bit, my life changed."

The first challenge was to stop incurring any new debt. "I remember somebody giving me a quarter to put in the parking meter so I could attend another meeting.... I stopped using my gas card, and people gave me money for gas ... and for food.... I had been humbled enough to be able to accept help with the right attitude."

The meetings also gave Susan the strength to face the credit-card companies and negotiate terms to pay them back. Now, 12 years later, she's paid off her credit cards, and she's been using only debit cards since joining DA. She owns her car outright and is steadily paying down her student loans (which were the bulk of her debt) and a few personal loans. She won't guess how long it will take to finish, but says the major transformation is that obsessive worry was long ago replaced by confidence.

"My credit rating is golden.... It's really quite a miracle!" Susan says. "I also have a profound belief in a higher power, which was never there. It is basically a spiritual program, and that's what we come to rely on."

Susan continues to attend DA meetings, to assure people that their lives can be transformed, and to maintain her own vigilance. "A lot of people stop going to meetings after they suddenly find themselves in much better financial condition... and then they're back a year later saying, 'I don't know what happened.' "

• Part one ran Aug. 16.

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