The $5,000 credit card, a lifetime of shopping with my sister, and the lie we never stopped telling our husbands.
I was 18 years old when a bank decided I was responsible enough to have a credit card with a $5,000 limit.
Let me say that again.
Eighteen. Years. Old.
Five thousand dollars.
I don’t know what kind of risk assessment they were doing back then, but clearly they had never met me.
Or Katey.
Because naturally, when you’re 18 years old and someone hands you what feels like $5,000 in free money, there is only one responsible thing to do.
Go shopping with your sister.
And that is exactly what we did.
Katey and I went shopping and maxed that bitch out.
I wish I could tell you what we bought.
I can’t.
Clothes, probably. Shoes. Purses. Random shit we absolutely needed at the time and couldn’t identify today if our lives depended on it.
What I can remember is that I’m sure we had the best damn time spending it.
Katey and I could make an event out of shopping. Give us some stores, money we shouldn’t be spending, and absolutely no adult supervision and apparently we were unstoppable.
Until the bill came.
Turns out—and this is important for any 18-year-olds who may be reading—credit cards are not actually free money.
Who knew?
And when I say it took me years to pay that thing off, I mean YEARS.
I met my husband when I was 23.
We moved in together when I was 25.
And that damn credit card was still there.
Seven years later.
At that point, Stacy basically inherited a financial decision made by teenage me and Katey.
Welcome to the relationship, babe. Here’s some debt from a shopping spree I went on with my sister seven years ago.
He helped me finally get that bitch paid off.
You would think that after carrying $5,000 worth of credit card debt into my mid-twenties, I would have learned my lesson about shopping.
And I did.
Sort of.
Katey and I just got smarter.
We got older. We got married. We had kids. We had husbands who might reasonably ask questions like:
“How much did you spend?”
Luckily, we had developed a very sophisticated accounting system by then.
It was $5.
Everything was $5.
New shirt?
$5.
Shoes?
$5.
Something we definitely did not need?
$5.
Coach bag?
Obviously $5.
I don’t even remember when we started doing it, but it became our thing.
We’d go shopping, come home with our bags, and somehow every single thing we’d purchased had been marked down to the exact same miraculous price.
Five dollars.
Our husbands weren’t stupid.
I’m pretty sure they knew damn well we weren’t out there stumbling across $5 Coach bags.
But Katey and I remained committed to the story.
It was only $5.
Apparently the lesson I learned from that first $5,000 shopping spree wasn’t stop shopping.
It was get better at explaining the purchases.
And for the record, I really did eventually learn how credit works. I have great credit now.
So technically, that first shopping spree was educational.
Just an extremely expensive, seven-year education.
But when I think about that stupid credit card now, I don’t think about the years it took to pay off.
I think about Katey.
I think about being 18 and walking through stores with my sister, probably carrying way too many bags, buying shit we didn’t need with money we definitely didn’t have.
And then I think about us years later.
Older.
Married.
Mothers.
Still walking through stores together.
Still buying shit we probably didn’t need.
Only now we knew exactly what to tell our husbands when we got home.
It was $5.
I don’t remember what we bought with that first $5,000.
I wish I did.
But I’m starting to realize that’s the thing about memories.
Sometimes you lose the little details.
You forget what you bought.
You forget which stores you went to.
You forget exactly what was said.
But you remember who was beside you.
And she was beside me.
For so much of it.
From maxing out a credit card at 18 to our imaginary $5 bargains as adults.
I’d pay that damn credit card off all over again for one more shopping trip with her.
And if we got one?
Whatever we bought…
it was only $5.
I’d love to hear from you.