HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: 'A "number" conversation almost derailed my relationship.'

This article originally appeared on Holly Wainwright's Substack, Holly Out Loud. Sign up here.

Some numbers are not just numbers. Notably, the ones on the bathroom scales. And the ones on your bank account app.

If I, at my grown-up age, could learn to separate those digits from judgement and shame and see them for what they are — cold, clear data — then, well, I'd be a guru, not just an ordinary Gen X woman with the average amount of bulky baggage.

On Mamamia Out Loud this week we discussed that second group of numbers, specifically, debt.

It doesn't sound like a very sexy conversation, not like the one we had immediately afterwards about whether some exes' sexual chemistry prohibits them from even attempting platonic friendship (cough, Ben and JLo).

But there is one kind of debt that is considered quite sexy these days, or at least, the companies that sell it to us would like us to think so.

Buy Now Pay Later is 'cute debt', 'pink debt', basically debt 'for the girls'.

Watch: Amelia, Jessie and Holly discuss 'cute debt' on Mamamia Out Loud. Post continues below.

Credit cards, bank loans and mortgages are downers. Heavy, serious, simultaneously out of reach and a prison to escape.

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) apps, on the other hand, are uppers. Their logos are pink and purple. Their slogans are peppy ("Little payments are so much cuter.") They market themselves on TikTok and Instagram via attractive young women showing off their hauls, ripping open packages and inviting you to covet all the things inside.

None of this is evil. People can and do use their BNPL services to buy groceries and school shoes, although it's true the categories they're most used for is clothing and fashion.

And none of this is new. Most people would prefer to (and are able to) pay one dollar a day for a year rather than $365 right now — it's psychology as old as we are.

But it's the young, female skew of this encouragement to 'shop it up' that pushes me right back to a particular neon-lit mall in southern Sydney.

And to a particular pair of jeans.

I made it all the way across the world without a credit card. By the seat of my baggy dungaree shorts' pants, if I'm honest.

I was always a bit shit with money, never having much, always spending right down to payday. I had a little bit in the bank saved from my baby-journo job as a street-press entertainment editor when I left London, aged 23. And I travelled to and across Australia, working as a waitress and a banana picker and a hostel cleaner as I went, as you do.

Then I landed in Sydney and back into a grown-up job and it wasn't until I was firmly mid-20s that I applied for, and got, that magical piece of plastic.

In a New York Times Magazine piece about the BNPL contagion, a woman called Elysia Berman described her first time using one of the apps to buy a handbag she could not afford: "Taking home such a treasure for only a small cost upfront felt like stumbling upon a cheat code — a kind of unlock."

That is exactly how I felt in Just Jeans on a lightly chilly autumn afternoon when I handed over a credit card for a pair of dark-wash, straight-leg Levis, button fly. I held my breath as it was swiped through the blinking machine, there was a ping, and I walked out of the shop with pants I did not actually have enough money in my bank account to pay for.

I was giddy. It felt magical. I felt high. Anything was possible.

Flash forward 10 years, and I was $25,000 in credit card debt. I wish I could tell you why. I was not dripping in designer clothes. I lived, then, in a small balcony-less, car-spot-less apartment, the weekly rent on which would make a young Sydneysider sob with envy in 2025.

I do know I used those cards to do things I categorically could not afford to do. Fly home to visit my family and friends in England. Party at music festivals. Be 'Out' most nights. I had a bit of a thing for colourful shoes. I would certainly taxi home when the bus would do.

But if you asked me, after that first pair of Levis, what I did with all that pretend money, I couldn't really tell you. I just lived in a chaotic whirl of financial denial and irresponsibility.

When people said they couldn't afford things, I would often wonder why they didn't just borrow money to do it. There's always a way, I would think, to get what you want.

"I just lived in a chaotic whirl of financial denial and irresponsibility." Image: Getty.

I do know that chronic avoidance was the enabler. I didn't look at my bank statements, my bills. When I lived alone, I had my electricity cut off at least once for ignoring demands. I would be offered another card, another line of credit, and I would said YES! I saw every invitation to increase my limit or sign up for a new card as a clear blue sky of possibility. And, of course, a means to juggle payments on the others that were heavy with unpaid interest.

I had, at times, a perverse pride in my ability to live on the edge of collapse — the skill I seemed to possess to push through anxiety around multiple negative balances until Payday. And other times, I was sick with the stress of it all, my stomach roiling with fear and self-directed righteous anger.

But mostly, I ignored the debt, and skated on past all the red flags, just like those girls spilling out their hauls on their single beds and laughing at the fact this $300 dress only cost them $30 — today.

Nobody knew, of course. This was shadowy, secret-self behaviour, for my eyes only.

Until it wasn't. Until that number just kept tumble-turning into a higher one, with unpaid interest. Until envelopes turned red. Until phone calls replaced polite suggestive emails and then texts. Until, as happened to me, life marches on and into a new era, one where you have fallen in love with a great person, you're of a supposedly responsible age now, and he, reasonably, thinks maybe you should move in together. And maybe, one day, buy a flat.

And then the bank wants a rundown of all your finances. One that will also be visible to your partner, because now all the money — and all the debt — will be shared.

I dreaded that conversation more than most I can remember. The horror at the idea that my behaviour — who I was — would be the reason we couldn't do this perfectly normal, sane thing that couples of our age (then, friends, then, I know) were doing all around us.

I remember where we were — on the beaten-up lounge in my apartment that by then Brent had moved into — and how his voice was pitched when he said "So, how much are we talking about?"

Reported statistics say that on average, young Australian men will be in slightly more debt than young women. That's because the things they're buying tend to be bigger-ticket items, like tech. But the statistics also show that young men are significantly more likely to have personal savings and an emergency fund. And that young women are experiencing more financial stress and overwhelm. And that they are much more likely to be using BNPL apps.

Listen to the full discussion about BNPL debt on Mamamia Out Loud. Post continues below.

It would be nice to tell you that here I am, at my grown-up age, completely sensible. That I have changed. And I have. After all that mess, consolidation and payment plans saw me paying off that recklessly-incurred debt well into early motherhood. I certainly no longer live in that swirl of chaos.

But it all has repercussions. We had to live on credit cards quite a bit in the double-childcare years, and there were a lot of tough choices. These days we are a reasonably secure, sensible family, but I can still be both avoidant and impulsive around money if I don't keep myself in check.

I'm still working on making numbers just be numbers and not harbingers of shame that make me want to go and hide under a bed, beating myself with a slipper (this is an exaggeration for dramatic effect, friends, please don't call anyone).

But what I know for absolute certain, is that if that version of myself hugging her dark-wash Levis in Westfield Miranda time-travelled to 2025, sitting on a bed cradling her TikTok machine, those cute little pink BNPL buttons on her phone would go from one to eight in a hot minute, fizzed up by the dopamine hit of now, now, why not?

And there would be nothing cute about it.

Sign up to Holly Wainwright's Substack here.

Read more from Holly:

• HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: The details that make Nicole and Keith's split kind of about us.

• HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: So, what do people do at night?

• HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: 'King Charles is "furious" with one of his sons. And it's not Harry.'

Feature image: Supplied.