THE Cambridge Connection - Episode 33

You’re in a good mood and you want to celebrate, you spend money. You’re down and out and you want to feel better, you spend money, so it definitely goes hand in hand and his story is quite intriguing. And your counseling career, you have heard the front end of this and you know when you first talk to people and you get their story and why they’re struggling and why they’re having problems, you know that mentally and emotionally they’re not in the greatest place and even just the initial conversation of offering hope that there’s going to be answers and solutions, you can automatically feel a short-term relief that they’re talking about it and instead of holding it and carrying it and every day just not really having an answer, at least even having the conversation, there’s a short-term relief that comes with that. Yeah, that’s if we can get the consumer to talk about it or admit it. A lot of times they’re embarrassed by it.

They don’t want to admit it, so sometimes we got to probe a little harder just to get things out of them to figure out how they got there, why they got there, and what they can do to help themselves. So many correlations, right? Even people with mental health problems, the messaging all the time that I see is you have to talk about it, reach out and talk to somebody, get some help, don’t continue to live revolving with the mental illness that you’re feeling. And I think now it’s more acceptable. I think years ago, people frowned or shunned those with mental health disorders.

Now it’s a little bit more acceptable. And I would say it’s more common, but it was common back then, but people are now facing it and admitting it. And I think that is just a fantastic eye-opener for all of those that are still hiding behind some things that, listen, there’s help and there’s other people that are feeling and doing the exact same thing you are. You’re not alone. Not alone.

And in all seriousness, I could joke about it. I’ve had my own mental ups and downs across my life. We could probably spend five shows talking about you and I on that. We’ve had these conversations. But that’s what this show is about, to give people an opportunity every week to tune into a conversation that’s going to steer towards getting help, whether it’s mental, financial, or both.

That’s what the show is here for. And I’m really happy to be on it, talking with you and with our special guest, Gordon Corsetti. So we’re going to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. This is Gordon Oliver with The Cambridge Connection.

See you in a minute. Spring is here, and it’s a great time to clean up your debts with a debt management plan from Cambridge Credit Counseling. Reduce your credit card interest rates and lower your monthly payments. Call Cambridge Credit Counseling today. 1-800-CAMBRIDGE.

Guest background and career change

Welcome back, everyone. This is The Cambridge Connection. I’m your host, Gordon Oliver, here with my co-pilot, Tina Marie. com. Gordon, welcome to The Cambridge Connection.

Gordon and Tina Marie, thank you guys so much for having me. I’m excited. This is important conversations. We’re going to talk about the aspects of mental wellness and debt problems and mental illness. But before we do that, can you give our listeners a little background on yourself and your journey as we get into this conversation?

Certainly. Well, the basic stuff is I’m currently 34. I’ve lived most of my life in and around Atlanta, Georgia, with a brief stint up in Baltimore, Maryland for work. And I’ve been primarily in the adult development business, professional development and e-learning development creation for a couple of different organizations before COVID came around. And I decided I did not want to do that anymore.

The money that I was making was not worth my health. And I’ve spent quite a long time working on improving my mental health over the past decade to 15 years. And I completely shifted career fields. And now I work outside, working at an organization called Jackson EMC. They’re an electrical co-op serving northeast Georgia for the most part.

And I work outside and I get physically active and I don’t have to answer emails for work anymore. And that’s been a great thing for my mental health. That’s a mind scrambling in and of itself, right? Gordon, right there, you’re my hero. I’m going to tell you.

Yeah, no. Everyone’s always like, are you going to stick with this? I’m like, as long as you don’t ask me to answer emails, I’m good. Yeah. All big holes.

All frickin’ holes. As long as I don’t have to do that. And it’s been a positive change for me, but that is also not for, really not out of the blue. I spent the better part of my adult life as a severely depressed, trying on every type of medication and treatment protocol that you could think of until I eventually got classified with treatment resistant depression and going through a really serious treatment protocol at the end of 2019, right before COVID at Emory and at a place called Skyland Trail. And I finally got myself into a really good, mentally good spot that I hadn’t been in.

But I also had for those 10, 15 years, constant debt. And then right before I got in the line of work, dealing with well over a hundred thousand, right about $112,000 worth of credit card, medical debt, personal loans, car work stuff. That was just an absolute mess. And so the last year and a half has been good for my mental health. And then now that my mind was finally in a really good spot, how could I get my financial spot in a place to match?

Now, Gordon, just a quick question. Gordon and I were talking earlier. Did you find yourself spending, you know, obviously when you were happy, find yourself spending more when you were sad? Is that the case? You just went off and spent to feel better as far as that was your therapy, retail therapy, so to speak?

Yeah. Yeah. There’s some of that retail therapy. For me, it turned out to just going out to eat, like I just enjoy going out on my own to eat. I don’t care where it’s at.

Have my books, spend two hours to myself, eat a full four-course meal when you get down to it. I did that last night. Yeah. Like it can be nice. But when you’re paying rent.

Medical debt and health struggles

And a car payment, and a whole bunch of other stuff, it just becomes unsustainable. But I would do that just because it was one bright spot in my life that I could control. But for the most part, I had been probably about 50% of my debts were straight up just paying credit cards for medical debt, via hospitalizations or outpatient treatment protocols, or more often psychiatric care that was out of network almost always. So I would have that. And so it’s like, I’m in that mentality, I think I saw it on Beef, like one character is like $100,000 in debt, and he just buys a $50,000 car, because what’s another 50,000 if you’re already 100,000 in debt?

So part of that was a little bit of willful denial of the situation and just being like, whatever. And the other part of that was just trying to find a couple little moments where I’m like, okay, I can do something nice for myself, even though it’s going to put me in a hole later. Yeah, and you know, medical debt, we know that healthcare, obviously, in this country is a humongous problem. And on the debt management cycle of things, there are many people that their financial well-being is crumbled by medical expenses. And this is a perfect example, while you’re trying to work through the humanistic mental part of this, you’ve got the normal day-to-day responsibility of having to be responsible to pay bills, which is another burden in and of itself.

And you going through that process, obviously, I think so many people can relate to what you’re talking about with the medical side, and then just the spending that at some point needed to be reined in if you’re going to get control of it. Oh, entirely. I know I’m not the only one who’s been in this particular bind before. And I’ve been fortunate, I’ve been able to have family and friends to kind of lean on in terms of, you know, number one, there’s their encouragement, but in particular, my particular family of parents and my sister, of helping me in many cases financially, that for stuff that otherwise would not have been affordable. The benefit for me was I had a pretty good health insurance plan up until I quit my job in COVID, then went back on Healthcare Marketplace, and now I’m paying my debts plus like $450 a month for something that by deductible was insane.

So it’s like, I’m looking at this just going like, you know, fingers crossed the whole dang time until I got on with a line working contractor here in Georgia, that I wouldn’t have another episode, that I wouldn’t go back into the hospital, and that level of stress waking up in the morning, going to bed with that at night, that compounds daily. It would cause more stress, I would assume. You know, so if you’re just joining us, this is The Cambridge Connection. com. And Gordon, the point that you just made too, you know, we talk about consumers, and Tina, when you counsel consumers that are having debt problems, sometimes speaking to a bankruptcy attorney is an alternative when there’s really no other answers.

Now Gordon, we’re going to get into your part of the story about how you dug out of it. But what consumers need to understand is health comes first. Absolutely. And it’s a shame. Listening to Gordon’s story, it’s a shame that you have to use credit cards simply to fund your own health care.

It doesn’t seem fair, but it’s reality. It is. It makes a bad problem even worse than a solvable problem seem unsolvable at the moment. And again, counseling people on this, this is where once you can get clarity, and whether that be by a counselor or even, Gordon, you decided to get into some education, and we’re going to get into that in a minute, but it’s just about being able to put a plan in place at some point, both first and foremost for your health so that you can wake up every day not feeling like you’re struggling and that everything is caving in, but starting with a plan on your health so that you can be well and better, and then of course dealing with the debt. And whatever that looks like, it’s not going to be the same for everybody, but it is reaching out and getting the help that is needed one way or the other.

So I think what we’re going to do here is we’re going to take a quick break, and then we’ll come back and we’re going to talk about your journey about getting out of debt and the things and the steps that you took to get to where you are today. This is Gordon Oliver with The Cambridge Connection. We’ll be right back. Hey all, it’s Tina Marie, and you might know me as Gordon Oliver’s co-pilot for The Cambridge Connection every Saturday morning. What you might not know is that I’ve known Gordie for a really long time, and as a certified credit counselor at Cambridge Credit Counseling for over 20 years, I am thrilled to join Gordie every week to share and chat about real people with real financial problems, along with many success stories both myself and all of the counselors at Cambridge Credit have been a part of.

We know it takes a village of support and inspiration if someone is struggling financially, so it’s nice to know if that person is you, that you’re not alone out there. m. right here on WHMP for The Cambridge Connection, because Gordie and I, we are here to help you have a better relationship with your money and hopefully make you smile. Right, Gordie? Couldn’t have said it better myself, Tina Marie.

Crisis breakdown and job change

Welcome back, everyone. This is The Cambridge Connection. com, and Gordon, again, this is an amazing conversation. I sometimes wish we had an hour, two hours, three hours to talk about this, because there’s so many ways we could deeply get into how people could relate to the situations that we’re discussing. So you were struggling mentally, you were struggling with debt, and at some point in the article in the blog that you write, which we will post on our social media pages and share, there was at some point that you had to stop the bleeding, both mentally and physically.

So can you talk about that? Yes. So I had moved back to Georgia in April of 2019, and I’m working with a great company. I’m doing the work that I’m really good at, and I’m riding a high. And the thing that, unfortunately, a lot of folks don’t recognize is the brain doesn’t deal with bad stress or good stress any differently, it just sees it as stress.

So good stress, get married, new job, new house, whatever, new baby, that’s inherently stressful. The brain just doesn’t recognize between that and losing your job or losing a kid or losing your spouse, like those bad things. It’s all the same, chemically, at the end of the day. And I ran for that for a while, and then October 2019, I couldn’t sleep for about a good week. I ran myself off the rails mentally, I just crashed.

And I overdosed. I took a whole bunch of Seroquel, and I woke up two and a half days later, and my body wouldn’t move. Oh, wow. And the creepy thing was, and the messed up thing was, is I’m waking up trying to stumble into my kitchen, and my first thought was not, I need to get help, but I need to get into work, which is not a good place to be in. So pretty much ignoring what put you in that situation in the first place?

Entirely. And that didn’t go away for a good long while. The entire time I’m in the psychiatric ward at Emory Wesley Woods in downtown Atlanta, the entire, I spent two weeks there, and then I spent time, 35 days in an adult rehabilitation center being housed at Skyland Trail, and then 60 days in their outpatient adult program. The entire time, half of my attention was so focused on, I got to get back to work. I got to get back to work.

I got to be productive again. I got to make money. This is costing me a lot of money being here. And that was a huge weight on my shoulders, but also just damaging, because when I got back to work, I expected myself to just be able to plug right the heck back in and just go to town, and I couldn’t do that. COVID hit, we went locked down, and I went from going back to an office now to being back in the room opposite the bed that I spent two days in unconscious, right?

Not a healthy environment for me to do any kind of good or even creative work in instructional design. And I broke down. I called my boss. I said, I can’t do this. And she, to her credit, she was like, okay, we get that.

Just give us your stuff and we’ll break our ways mutually and wish you the best. And the weird thing for me He was, in that spot, I had maybe 10 grand in savings and a whole bunch of new medical bills on top of a lot of existing debt. But I finally felt like I at least made a good decision for myself, knowing that I just gave up an $85,000 a year job and really good benefits because I knew this wasn’t going to be healthy for me. So I spent all of the summer of 2020 trying to figure out what would be good for me to do, not just to pay the bills, but to enjoy being able to get that paycheck in the same bit. So I found my way into the utility industry, went to trade school, learned a lot more about line work and electrical utilities than I ever thought you could know, and I’m still learning.

Steps to pay off debt

But one of the other things they did there was introduce us into some very basic financial management stuff, the benefits of a retirement account, the differences between traditional and Roth IRAs. And that set me on a path to actually understanding how I can dig my way out of this mountain of debt that I’d found myself under. So in the article, it says that you love lists and you kind of used Dave Ramsey’s seven steps to try to get control of the situation. And just for our listeners and our friends, this show is sponsored by Cambridge Credit Counseling. And one of the things that they do is, most of the things that they do is free counseling with different opportunities and different ways of doing things.

So there are different strategies. Not everyone works for everyone, but it seems like this one from Dave Ramsey worked for you. Can you tell us a little bit about you, how you made the steps, and then how you got to where you are today? Certainly. So I did, I can’t remember some movie, there was a movie, maybe it was Amy Adams, she like froze her credit cards in a block of ice, and that always stuck with me.

I wasn’t going to let go of that method, but I wanted to be a little destructive. So I took a pair of gardening shears to, I had 16 credit cards. I don’t know how I got to that point, but I did. I had 16 cards, and they were spread out over a whole bunch of different things, and so I cut them up, and then two weeks later, I still kept seeing balances increase on them. I’m like, oh right, we live in the digital age, and I have a lot of subscriptions that are on these cards.

So I spent a day hunting through every freaking thing online that I had subscribed to, or that a card was linked to, and I deleted all those cards and that stuff. And for the stuff that I had to pay, car insurance, phone bill, those kind of things, I linked those directly to my debit card. I was like, if anything’s going to go down in my account, it’s going to be the money that I actually have. And so that was stopping the bleeding. That was, at the very least, not seeing the total balance on all the cards go up, and therefore at least put a cap on that.

So real quick, for the short-term gain, short-term goal, how did that feel? Do you remember the moment with those shears, cutting those cards? How did it feel after you did that? Did it feel at some sort of, you’re going the right way? More control, maybe?

Yes. There was a sense of control. There was definitely a sense of just like, okay, I’ve looked at this plan, I’ve decided it, this is the first step in making this thing happen. This was good. So that, at the very least, gave me a little bit of a nudge in going this direction.

And then it was, how can I find ways to continually motivate myself to keep chipping away at this debt over time? I love this line in your blog, as a student of my own stress and of stress in general, I could not abide emboldening a feeling of life or death struggle in getting out from under debt. So as a student, I love that, because this show is about wisdom and empowerment, and that just says that you accepted that you had some learning to do and you went through some rough times, but you found your way with some helpful advice to dig out of it. Yeah, and it’s one of those things of, you know, the idea that I referred to in that article is this idea of being gazelle intense. So to get out of debt, you must be as stressed out as a gazelle running away from a lion.

Now, mentally, I can kind of accept that kind of intensity, okay? But I knew from my own work with not only mental agility, but just for myself personally, you can’t run away from a lion indefinitely at full speed. A gazelle can’t do that, the human brain can’t do that from stress, it’s physically impossible. You’ll die of a heart attack before you get eaten, that’s just what’s going to happen. I looked at that, I’m just like, okay, if these are the steps, and the general idea of being here is that you’re just going to eliminate every possible extracurricular expense that there is, and you’re going to eat ramen noodles for the rest of your life.

Like, I’d eaten ramen noodles when I was 19, I’m not going to do that again at 33. I kind of like ramen noodles, hold on. Sodium in there, though. I’m fine on that end, like, I will eat some ramen, but not the microwavable ones on that. I’ve changed a little bit, a bit more discerning in my taste, but part of that is also respecting that fact that, like, hey, I have grown up a little bit, it is okay to have a meal out on your own, that is something I have continually enjoyed, but it’s going to be, you know, after I get a pay raise, right?

It’s going to be after I get a rebate on something, and I can use that, you know, unexpected money in a useful way for me, and then the rest of it can go into the debt. But there was no way that I was going to allow myself to treat a chronic stressor the way these particular steps in the system worked out to saying, you have to deal with it as if it’s a life and death situation. It’s not healthy, and it’s not sustainable. So I took a step back from that, mentally, and just, okay, let’s just track what I had. I had my Excel spreadsheet, and every week, I got paid, and every week, I got a little bit less, and that was enough.

Reflecting on wisdom and milestone

You know, we talk about wisdom, you know how martial arts has its steps of you becoming a master, and it takes a really long time? I’m sure you can look back at some of this experience and know that that’s how you’ve gotten to where you are with that unique wisdom from going through those struggles on your own. Well, yeah, there’s two things for quotes in the martial arts side of things. I used to do that in kickboxing, jiu-jitsu. One of them is that the black belt only covers two inches of your rear end.

You have to cover the rest of it. So it’s not really not so much just like the skills of that. It’s like you still need to put that stuff into practice when it counts. But the other bit was a black belt finally got promoted, and one of the younger, you know, newer belts asked him, how does it feel to be a black belt in jiu-jitsu? This takes about 10 years on average, and the guy says, I feel like I’m finally ready to learn jiu-jitsu.

Wow. So it’s not like the mastery step of that when you actually get to whatever that level may be across anything. You generally see the same comment of, I finally feel like I know enough to really start learning whatever this thing is, and I haven’t really quite approached that spot yet in terms of my personal finances, but at least with debt and having bought into these steps and used my social support network to stay on top of these things, I feel like I’ve got a glimpse of what that mastery could look like, and I feel pretty good about that. As you should. So obviously we’re running out of time, so a couple things.

Can you tell our listeners about the milestone that you just hit and how long it took you to pay off that $112,000 in debt? I paid off the $112,000 on March 8th of this year. It took me, once I actually, from cutting up the credit cards, that was pretty much January 3rd of 2021. So that was cutting out what expenses I could, moving in with my family, and getting as much overtime as I possibly could, and any incidental or other income went straight into those debts. It took me a year and a half.

I booked it, but even if it took me two years or two and a half, I at least got out of the spot from it. I made it a much more manageable weight in about a year, and in those last six months was, okay, cool. This is snowballing in a good way, and then I just woke up one day, I had one more payment to make. That was good. It was awesome.

My friend, you are a beacon of light, and your situation is one that we will celebrate because you’ve been through mental struggles, you’ve been through debt struggles. Not only are you now out of that situation in both of those, tell our listeners about the teaching that you do and the speaking that you do. Certainly. So my organization is Mental Agility, and it’s Mentally Agile. I like to say I speak to the unique human ability to change our minds, but more importantly than just that, the how of being able to change our minds.

So I think the bigger issue is that we generally just tell people just, hey, just go do this, and then we leave them without tools. And my thing from the mental health standpoint is the only way I’ve ever gotten better is with tools and with support and really digging into what those are and utilizing them as many different ways that I can. And so I do that with mental health, and I see a direct correlation in doing that for getting out of debt from whatever system somebody chooses to do. But if you give people tools and they get buy-in, I think the sky’s the limit of anything that you’re wanting to do. And now that I’m debt-free, I’m looking forward to doing my mental agility workshops and teaching people ways, high school teams all the way up through professional organizations, how to think a little bit more clearly under stress because I’ve at least proven I’m able to do that with the stuff that I’ve figured out.

Contact information and closing remarks

Absolutely. So before we let you go, can you tell our listeners where they can find you and how they can reach out to you? Sure thing. com. I’m at G.

com for email. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Mental Agility, or Gordon Corsetti. I’m pretty responsive, so you can hit me up on those things. Thank you so much for joining us. We truly appreciate your time today.

And I want to continue this discussion in the near future. I would love to have you back on the show. Are you open to that? I would love to have you back on the show. I would love to have you back on the show.

I would love to have you back on the show. I would love that as well. Call me anytime. You got it. Thank you so much, Gordon.

We’re going to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. This is The Cambridge Connection. Are you looking for better techniques when you’re in a stressful situation? Gordon Corsetti is a nationally acclaimed public speaker who owns and operates Mental Agility.

Mental Agility is an organization committed to sharing various ways of thinking to help those both with and without mental illness live more fulfilling lives. Through workshops and speaking engagements, Gordon shares practical methods to address negative thinking patterns and calming techniques for any stressful situation, including the serious mental health challenges that come from mowing money. Gordon himself recently paid off over $112,000 of medical and credit card debt. com. Welcome back, everyone.

Employer resources and closing

com. Just an incredible conversation from real people, real problems to an amazing success story. This is why in our messaging on this show for employers, for their employees that in their walls might be struggling with debt and they don’t even know it, a consumer just out there trying to figure it out themselves, not necessarily having support and knowing it even exists. That’s another thing I kind of wanted to bring up. I know where I work, there is an employee assistance program.

I don’t think a lot of employees are even aware of this. Definitely ask your employer if there is an employee assistance program available. I’m pretty clear that most of them don’t have a credit counseling or debt counseling opportunity. So, of course, the sponsor of this show, Cambridge Credit Counseling, if an employer is listening and they want to put the benefits in, feel free to contact 1-800-CAMBRIDGE and they’ll be able to point you in touch to talk to somebody to get that assistance. Absolutely.

I’d be more than happy to help someone. So Gordon, I know every week you bring us a quote. What do you got for us today? Thank you. Almost every problem people face in their careers and other aspects of their lives, such as failed diets, marriages, and financial problems, all are the result of not taking enough action.

Grant Cardone. And why I chose that quote is anybody listening to the show, if you are having problems mentally, reach out and get help. If you’re having debt problems that are causing mental problems, reach out and get help. If you’re having trouble with a failed diet or your marriage, get help. It’s always about the time has to come where action is taken to get the assistance that you need.

I’d like to give a huge thank you to our producers, Leah and Lisa. As you can see from this show and the others we’ve done in the past, we have great experts that come on this show to help you, our friends, and our consumers with helpful information to be financially wise. com, click podcasts for The Cambridge Connection, or you can find us where you listen to your favorite podcasts. Once again, we want you to be part of the conversation. org and please post and share this show because so many people can use it.

And if you need debt help, feel free to call 1-800-CAMBRIDGE.