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.
