The Freelance Writer
$25,000-$35,000

Newcomers to the city are cheap dates, easily intoxicated by its resemblance to our dreams. And many of us labor under the misapprehension that an entry-level job in just about any white-collar profession is a ticket to a solid, white-collar life in the city. Maybe once, but not anymore.

Lea started out on a path very much like my own -- she graduated from an Ivy League school and moved to New York to write. Her clips from college papers were strong, and she managed to land an entry-level job at a magazine, making about $20,000 a year. She found a share in a sunny, rent-controlled three-bedroom on the Upper West Side with an older woman who worked for the city. Her rent was a blissful $575 a month.

She soon began landing freelance writing assignments covering the entertainment business for newspapers and magazines. She quit her day job to focus on writing, augmenting her income with intermittent word processing. As her bylines proliferated, Hollywood studios began flying her on junkets to Los Angeles. They treated her to elaborate meals and put her up in hotels to get her to cover their movies and stars. In a tough business, she was an enviable success. She imagined a time in the not-so-distant future when writing alone would support her.

Self-sufficiency proved elusive, however. Her income ranged from $25,000 to $35,000 a year, including office work. She lived frugally -- she ate in, she never bought expensive clothes. Still, her paychecks never quite covered her meager budgets, and she relied increasingly on credit cards. After five years, her debts hit $37,000. Even then, she didn't question her career choice. "I was addicted to the proximity to fame and power, to the feeling that it made me an insider," she says. "It was like a parable for the whole culture of living in New York."

In 1995, Lea was in the middle of an interview with the actor Jim Carrey when the true magnitude of her mounting debts finally hit her. His family was dirt poor, Carrey told her, but as a young man he had privately written himself a check for $5 million, stashing it away and vowing that someday he would have the money to cash it. Now he could.

But instead of writing imaginary checks to herself, Lea realized, she was drawing ever-larger advances against an uncertain future. "Here I was sitting opposite this guy making $7 million a film, and I was worrying about whether the $20 in my pocket was enough to get back to the airport. I couldn't pay the rent. I wasn't even opening my bills. I suddenly realized my life was a mess. It was all about to crash."

To straighten out her life, Lea started attending meetings of Debtors Anonymous, a loose translation of the alcoholics' original. At her suggestion, I attended a meeting myself, one of about 40 held weekly in the New York City area. In a church gymnasium on the Upper East Side, about ten men and twenty women gathered in folding chairs, milling around and chatting amiably while I sat nervously in the corner. They were a good-looking bunch -- men in suits, stylish women, one with a Frédéric Fekkai shopping bag. They introduced themselves in customary twelve-step fashion -- "I'm Paul, and I'm a recovering debtor. I have been 90 days solvent, 'not debting' every day . . ."

I expected sermons on cutting back and doing without, but that's not what Debtors Anonymous is about at all. In the group's lingo, there are two kinds of debtors -- "bulimic" and "anorexic," or overspenders and underearners.

This meeting turned out to be nothing but underearners. Like Lea, they felt they just weren't letting themselves make as much money as they really needed and truly merited. "I think tonight I am just going to say it," stammered one handsome twentysomething young man, with shoulder-length dark hair and a V-neck cashmere sweater. "I deserve to make $80,000 this year." Applause and congratulations all around.

Most of the crowd turned out to be artists, writers, musicians, and entrepreneurs of varying degrees of success. One woman, trying to keep her decorating business afloat, reported that the "action" she had taken this week to stay out of debt was sending out flyers and mailings.

Debtors Anonymous, Lea told me, helps people accept that their fantasy career may have to wait, that it is okay to settle for a boring job that pays the bills. Lea herself stopped writing and found a position as an administrator at a Park Avenue law firm making about $55,000 a year -- "That was a lot for me, although still not middle-class in New York," she says. New York's chapters of Debtors Anonymous, it seems, often specialize in helping dreamers postpone their dreams.

Lea was lucky. A year and a half after she took her office job, an agent called with an idea for a book, and she landed an advance. A couple of months ago, her book was published -- Teach Yourself Personal Finance in 24 Hours.