What would you do if you owed $20,000? Would you: A) not tell your parents? B) start your own website that asked for money without apology? or C) stop coloring your hair, getting pedicures, and buying Gucci? If you were Karyn Bosnak, you'd do all three.Karyn received e-mails from people all over the world, either confessing their own debt-ridden lives, or criticizing hers. But after four months of Internet panhandling and selling her prized possessions on eBay, her debt was gone!
In Save Karyn: One Shopaholic's Journey to Debt and Back, Karyn details the bumpy road her financial -- and personal -- life has traveled to get her where she is today: happy, grateful, and completely debt-free. In this charming cautionary tale, Karyn chronicles her glamorous rise, her embarrassing fall, and how the kindness of strangers in cyberia really can make a difference.
When I first heard about this on the news, I was sceptical, and a little doubtful as to why people would want to help someone who freely admitted she'd spent the money on ... well, nothing.
And then I read this, and I saw why. Karyn is honest, funny, sweet - and I could identify so much with how and why she spent the money. I've been a bit ... silly... with plastic in the past, and I defy anyone to read this and to be judgemental.
I got out of debt too, eventually, but I'll never have a great credit rating. I'm envious that Karyn managed to do it with so much more grace and humour but I was rooting for her all the way.
3 comments:
Okay, I am intrigued ... but more by your review than by an initial positive take on Karyn's choice to go to the internet for help ... I am not sure how one can pan-handle with grace and humor, though I have seen homeless persons do so with a fragile dignity ... however, after reading your review, I do want to read the book. With so much genuine need in this world, I am not sure my sympathies can be, or should be, engaged by a first world child who was gullible enough to buy into [literally] the whole "material girl" scene. Re-reading this before posting, I realize how judgemental I must sound ... but a preferential option for the poor is a moral imperative for me ... one I try to implement when giving to my favored charities ... and I somehow don't see wanton credit card users standing side by side with sufferers from Muscular Dystrophy, with the homeless, with exploited children in third world countries, with native American families in need of wood stoves just to survive the harsh mountain winters in the American SW, with victims of natural disasters ... who are the usual focus of my sharing.
Yay for her but I can tell you for sure this kind of thing only works once. It will never happen again. It's like the guy that traded stuff and started with a pencil or something like that and ended up with a house in Canada and the people that raffled their house. I wish I would have thought of it though and I'm a heck of a lot older than Karyn.
Love
Patti xxx
Thanks for the review. I, too, am intrigued, so I went straight to my library's website and placed a request for this book.
Post a Comment