The American Dream – “the ideal that every citizen of the United States should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative.” For some it looks like a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, a family car and a “toy” car, 2.5 children, Fido the dog and lavish vacations overseas. This lifestyle represents the ideals of comfort, security, family and freedom that many Americans, value and pursue. Too often this pursuit is undertaken with debt. The dream then sloooooowly  becomes a nightmare.

So long as there is a job and income one can continue to row row row the boat gently down the stream, though these days there’s less rowing and more gas-powered speed boating. Life merrily comes about as if one has arrived, has attained the dream, the American dream until debt slaps you back into reality and demands payment. There will be no text messages sent of its soon destructive arrival. No Instagram, Facebook, or

TikTok posts. Not even the courtesy of a ‘Due in 30 days’ letter. Nope, just debt doing its thing to ruin life as you know it because that’s what debt does. That once vivid and pleasant dream has quickly morphed into and enduring and tortuous nightmare. All due to a simple 4-letter word, debt.