Back in the black

READ MY WALL Author Jen Lancaster made it through hard financial times with her sass intact.

It took almost a year before the reality of unemployment set in for author Jen Lancaster, 41, who lost her job as the dot-com boom fizzled after September 11, 2001. After her boyfriend (now husband), Fletch, lost his job, too, the couple decided to move out of Bucktown. But even in a more affordable West Town apartment (ah, those were the days!), they were sliding too quickly down a financial slope. “We went through Fletch’s severance, my unemployment was long gone, there was no money coming in—and we had no way of getting any money to come in,” she recalls. “We were going to the grocery store and buying [generic] dog food for 29 cents. We couldn’t give them the good stuff anymore. We didn’t have health insurance; we didn’t have anything that we needed.” Not long after they burned through Fletch’s severance, the couple’s car was repossessed. To get cash, Lancaster hawked her designer bags on eBay and borrowed money from her family (“If I had known how many years I would hear about the money my mother lent me after I paid it back, I would never have done it”). Just as they hit their breaking point, the day they were served with an eviction notice, Fletch landed a job.

Five years later, Lancaster finally feels as if she’s recovered—but just barely. After a year without a job, Lancaster began blogging about her financial frustrations. Bolstered by her large online following, she wrote a memoir, Bitter Is the New Black, that chronicled her reign as corporate go-getter and her subsequent fall from grace. In January 2003, she sold the manuscript to Penguin/NAL for a small advance, and although the book came out in March 2006, she didn’t receive her first royalty check until more than a year later. During that year, she wrote her second book, Bright Lights, Big Ass (Penguin/NAL, $14), even as she was temping full time to make ends meet. Though the couple just moved into a 5,000-square-foot rented house in Logan Square that Lancaster unabashedly calls a “mansion,” they’re not exactly reverting to their old free-spending ways. “We rarely, rarely, rarely go out to eat,” she says, and they pay for pretty much everything with cash—Lancaster recently paid $8,000 cash for furniture at Macy’s Clearance Center. “It’s not that I think credit is bad,” Lancaster explains. “I’m just not going to buy anything that I can’t afford, and that’s the best lesson that’s stayed with me.”

Because Lancaster was able to collect unemployment and had family help, her slide into financial distress wasn’t the free-fall less-fortunate people, like Jen Davis, experience. In 2003, the 30-year-old photographer broke her ankle and leg while running across the street to catch a bus. Like many freelancers, she didn’t have health insurance, not to mention she was already mired in credit-card debt, leaving her with no way to pay her $17,000 medical bills. After talking with her parents and a credit counselor, she declared bankruptcy. “At that point, it was either bankruptcy or put [the hospital costs] on the credit card and have a 22 percent interest rate,” Davis says. “I had guilt about bankruptcy. I felt like, Do I deserve this? It wasn’t ideal, but I had to do it to survive.” While the move wiped out her credit-card and medical debt, she still feels the ramifications six years later. Bankruptcy remains on your credit report for ten years, lowering your credit score and restricting access to unsecured credit and therefore to services that require a credit card as a form of insurance. “I’m 30 now,” Davis says, “and I can’t have a credit card; I can’t rent a car. I don’t have the luxury of putting photography equipment on my credit card.” Nevertheless, she’s doing much better these days. After finishing grad school at Yale, she recently moved to New York, where she’s lined up a steady freelance photography job.

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