A 26-Year-Old Went Into Crippling Debt Trying to Become ‘Instagram Famous’
“I was living a lie.”
Listen, not everyone can be a social media influencer. Some people manage to weasel their way into the hearts and Instagram feeds of millions of followers thanks to their style, charm, and/or hotness… while others fall flat no matter how hard they try.
A good example of the latter is 26-year old Lissette Calveiro, who moved from Miami to New York City in 2013 for an internship that made her feel like she was living in a “Sex and the City dream,” but even though she tried to make it look like she was ballin’, she was, in fact, riding shotgun on the struggle bus.
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“I was shopping for clothes to take ‘the perfect ’gram. I was living above my means. I was living a lie and debt was looming over my head,” she told the New York Post. Damn, girl. Why didn’t anyone inform homegirl over here that NYC is fucking expensive? A damn loaf of bread costs an arm and a leg in New York.
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Anyway, after she accepted a full time job as a publicist, her quest for social media stardom sank her into $10,000 of debt, thanks to monthly shopping sprees that she couldn’t afford, which included things like $1,000 Louis Vuitton purses.
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To drain her bank account even more, she felt the need to prove to her followers that she could travel in style, so she’d take monthly trips to places like Austin, L.A., the Bahamas, and Las Vegas.
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“Snapchat had these [geo-] filters and I wanted to collect at least 12,” Calveiro said. “If you break it down, a lot of the travel I was doing in 2016 was strictly for Instagram.”
Wow…that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.
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Well, when she realized she wasn’t exactly a millionaire and was swiftly going broke, she stopped spending excessively, and toned down her constant splurges. “I knew that moving to New York, I had to get my act together or I wasn’t going to survive.”
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Uh, no shit. As someone who lives in NYC, I can tell you now that it’s not as glamorous as it seems…unless you’re very, very wealthy.
Luckily, Calveiro got the hint about that, and got herself a quaint $700 a month shoebox in Inwood, which is the northern tip of Manhattan, and cut her spending down to $35 a week, which she spent on groceries.
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After living a frugal life for over a year, she managed to pay off her debt and move into an apartment in SoHo, where she has two roommates and pays $1,300 a month for rent.
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“Nobody talks about finances on Instagram,” she says. “It worries me how much I see girls care about image. I had a lot of opportunities to save. I could’ve invested that money in something.”
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Well, my friends, don’t try to be a social media influencer. It’ll only get you thousands of dollars in debt. That’s the moral of the story. Don’t be stupid.
H/T: New York Post