Digging Herself Out of Debt Through Others’ Pockets

If ever there was a musical waiting to be written, it’s Karyn Bosnak’s tale--the true saga of a bubbly small-town blond who learns about life and debt when she moves to the big city.

Act 1: Our heroine is a winsome lass from Gurnee, Ill., near where her sweet, shopaholic mother owns a frozen-custard shop and her straight-arrow dad (a telephone repairman) never bought anything he couldn’t afford to pay for with cash.

Bosnak’s parents divorced when she was small. Her mother remarried and continued to shop. “My mom thinks shopping solves everything,� Bosnak said in a telephone interview. “She was like, ‘Feeling low? Let’s buy a blouse to cheer you up.’ Or ‘You got good grades? Let’s shop to celebrate.’ We were once on vacation and she actually charged a Mercedes on a credit card. I just grew up that way.�

(K.C. Dieck, Bosnak’s mother, confirms that story but says she did not leave the car on her credit card. “I went home and immediately refinanced it.� Shopping “runs in our family,� she said. “My mother loved it, too.�)

Bosnak, who says only that she’s in her 20s, graduated from Chicago’s Columbia College in 1996, took some local TV production jobs and left in 2000 to find her fortune in New York. She was soon earning $100,000 a year as a cable TV producer, she said. That seemed a fortune indeed. With that kind of money, she figured, she could afford just about anything.

The credit card companies agreed. They sent her more plastic cards than she could comfortably carry in her new Gucci wallet. She used them all. “The offers came in the mail. I had seven cards at my peak. I would run them up, get a new card, transfer the balance, and then I had a zero balance on the first one. It was great.�

Bosnak also fell in love. Not with a guy, but with Bergdorf Goodman, the handsome stone edifice on upper Fifth Avenue, just steps from the Plaza hotel, across from Trump Towers. It is a wonderland packed with goodies that only the very rich can afford. Bosnak felt very rich.

She made frequent pilgrimages from her one-room East 57th street apartment (at $1,950 per month) to the store’s cosmetic counter, where she regularly loaded up on La Prairie products, paying up to $150 per jar. Then she’d bop around the shop, swathing her shapely size 6 figure in Prada, Gucci, BCBG, Theory and Shelli Segal clothes. She bought $400 shoes, $500 bags, $600 coats--�That’s not a bad price for a warm coat�--and she never paid cash.

Next, she’d hop a cab to Bloomingdale’s, “it was open till 9,� and in addition to clothes, she’d charge “all sorts of great stuff for the house.�

Bosnak’s constant stream of lattes, manicures, pedicures, bikini waxes were adding up. Her monthly haircut and blond highlights alone cost $400, which she said is “standard price for a good cut and color out here.� Her twice-weekly personal trainer cost $800 per month. “It sounds so over-the-top,� she said, “but it’s just what things cost in New York.�

Just about the time that Bosnak sat down to add up her credit card bills, (which tallied about $20,000 after little more than a year), she lost her job.

Act 1 ends operatically. Our heroine flings herself onto her goose-down comforter, sobbing uncontrollably in her Fendi robe. She has nowhere to turn. She is too embarrassed to even tell friends how much she owes; she cannot tell her family. What’s worse, the economy has tanked and she cannot land even a menial job. Curtain falls.

Act 2: Bosnak’s Brilliant Idea. She is alone at her laptop, in her new, less expensive Brooklyn apartment, which she shares. She cannot afford to go out. She has bought an Internet domain name and set up a Web site (www.save karyn.com) and has begun cyber-begging to pay off her debts.

“Hello! My name is Karyn, I’m really nice and I’m asking for your help! You see, I have this huge credit card debt and I need your help to pay it off. So if you have an extra buck or two, please send it my way!�

After just over a month, a few thousand dollars have trickled in. She’s received 10,000 e-mails on her multi-page site. She adds to it every day. An introductory letter explains who she is without revealing her full name and how she got in this mess. A page called “The Daily Buck� tells the things she’s doing to save and earn money. She’s selling her clothes on EBay, cutting her own hair, using Oil of Olay, shopping at Old Navy, if at all.

An entry from last Wednesday: “Today I broke down and ordered some much-needed contact lenses.� She didn’t buy them from her doctor, where they’re $30, she writes on her site, but did extensive pricing research on the Web. She then tells readers where she found lenses for $10 less. She is helping others. She is also becoming a Miss Financial Lonelyhearts of sorts, answering e-mails from around the world--India, Australia, New Zealand, England--from people in worse debt than she is who want her advice. She starts to feel wise. In control. Of use. She still does not go out, even with good friends, she explained, “because I am still in debt and I am too embarrassed to talk about it.�

She has realized recently that she loves to write. Her Web site is packed with cheery, practical prose that is neither profound nor deeply personal--just an ongoing surface explanation of her life and times.

And she is becoming controversial. Anti-save-Karyn Web sites are popping up. Chat rooms are full of pro-and anti-Karyn chatter. Is she a self-centered, spoiled spendthrift or a clever girl who has seen the error of her ways and is trying to go straight? TV and print journalists are e-mailing her their phone numbers, asking her to call. She eventually does.

Brief stories have appeared in papers around the country, but she remained anonymous. She did not want to divulge her name until her bills were paid. About two weeks ago, she finally told her mother about her debt and her Internet begging scheme, and all went well. When she tried to tell her dad, he kept hollering, “You owe what?! You owe what?!�

“I can’t get to tell him the Internet part because he can’t get over the fact that I ran up such bills. He is in shock.�

Curtain falls as Bosnak is trying to futilely explain how it all happened.

Act 3: A Milwaukee journalist finds Bosnak’s 80-year-old grandfather in Wisconsin, who inadvertently reveals his grandchild’s full identity. She decides to out herself before anyone else does--even though she still owes $10,000. On Aug. 16 she goes on the “Today� show, where she is interviewed by Matt Lauer. “He’s a real dreamboat,� she later said. Agents watch the show, find her telegenic, sunny, marketable. They call with proposals for her to do books and films. “Nothing is finalized yet,� she said. “In fact,� she confided, “I’m not sure any of that will work out.� But what definitely will benefit her future, she said, is all she has learned from this experience.

“I realize I’ve lived the wrong way. It’s not just about shopping and debt. It’s that I always chased the jobs that paid the most money. I’d leave each job for one that paid better, though I never was really happy in any of them. I liked the people but not the career. TV production was what I knew how to do, and I felt stuck with it.�

Since she’s been unemployed and poor, she said, she’s “just happy with who I really am. I don’t feel the need to shop anymore. Even if I had money, I’d never do it again.� As a result of all this, she’s found things she’s really good at, things she likes to do. Like writing.

“This Web site is very me. I now know I can get my feelings across when I write. I’ve had about 500,000 hits in the past two months,� she said, and she thinks maybe that’s because people like what she writes.

She may have a point. Other cyber-begging sites have been up longer than hers and have received nowhere near the response. Most are crass, one-note solicitations from people who seem to believe they deserve a handout. One man is panhandling for a Hummer, others just for fun and profit. Bosnak’s, on the other hand, comes across as sincere. She said she’s proud she’s been totally open and honest throughout her financial crisis. She did wrong, she admitted it, she asked for help. She furthermore didn’t want anyone to contribute to her instead of giving to charity. “If they had an extra buck after everything, I hoped they’d send it to me.�

Her future looks brighter now than when she was earning big bucks. “I’ve learned I can really communicate this way,� she said. Whether current offers pan out or not, she plans to write a book about her experience. And she’d like to find work that involves writing, something in marketing or public relations, perhaps. “It was my major in college, and maybe I shouldn’t have strayed away.�

Choral finale: Bosnak is at home with her new retinue of managers, agents and attorneys, all of whom are belting out advice on her upcoming book, TV talk show and indie film. Anything’s possible, it’s a musical, right?