“Finance it? What do you mean?” I looked at the box in my hand, which held a sterling silver and diamond ring I planned to give my girlfriend for Christmas in a few weeks. She was elsewhere in the mall with our friend Katie; we’d separated so we could buy each other gifts.

The associate explained that I could apply for financing and pay for the ring in installments, which were interest-free for the first 12 months. I had the slightly more than $300 that the ring cost in cash; it was one of the nicest rings in my budget. (All the white gold ones were too much money.) But if I financed it, which I hadn’t even considered as an option, I could afford to spend a little more on my other gifts and even save some for the new year. I could start putting away money for appliances I needed in my apartment or a used car to drive to an off-campus internship.

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I asked for an application and after a few minutes of processing, I was approved. I had started using my first credit card, a Discover Student card, only a few months prior, and it wasn’t maxed out yet, so I genuinely believed I could make the decision responsibly.

After I left the store, I met back up with my friend Krista, my shopping partner while I looked for my girlfriend’s gifts. “That was the most money I’ve ever spent on Macey,” I said, nervous and excited in equal measure. “I hope she loves it.”

I was too embarrassed to admit I’d opened a store credit card to pay for it; it seemed like something my college friends, who all came from middle-class families, would know better than to do. “Don’t spend money you don’t have” was a wise adage their parents shared when they taught them tips like paying for a car in cash. My dad taught me how to return items to Walmart without a receipt if we were running low on money between paychecks and needed an extra $20 for milk and bread.

A few weeks later, Macey and I spent our first Christmas Day together and I surprised her with the ring during a short, chilly walk. I didn’t tell her that I’d financed the ring or how many hours working in the reading and writing center on campus it would take to pay off. I didn’t say that I’d wanted to get her a white gold ring with a larger karat diamond. She’d also given me her priciest gift to date, a sterling silver replica Time Turner from the Harry Potter franchise I’d been obsessed with for years but couldn’t afford.

Instead, I said that I loved her and wanted to marry her someday, and asked her if she wanted the same thing. We both cried and she said yes, but the reality of ever having enough money to get married eluded even my colorful, wildly hopeful imagination. We both grew up with single parents with underpaying jobs who couldn’t foot the bill for our college education. We would graduate in a year and a half with student loan debt (and me with thousands of dollars in credit card debt just to buy necessities like books, snow boots, and groceries).

The diamond promise ring was an irresponsible romantic lifeline; I was betting on our future. Someday, I would pay off the ring. Someday, we could afford to get married. Someday, I would be able to spend more for white gold, Macey’s favorite. None of that felt true as I went home to my dad’s over winter break to collection notices and service shut off warnings; business was slow for a cab driver during the rise of Uber and Lyft and in the wake of the recession.

It took me about a year and a half to pay off the Belden Jewelers credit card, which I promptly closed. Eventually, I admitted to Macey that I’d taken out a loan to get her ring. She told me that she never wanted me to feel pressured to spend money on her or use a credit card to buy her presents, she just wanted to spend time with me. She told me she’d sometimes felt the same stress: That the cost of her gift reflected how much she loved me, and she worried about spending less on my gifts than I did on hers.

It’s easy to write-off the monetary value of holiday gifts or the importance of deals on Black Friday when you’re financially comfortable. When I was poor, that fact haunted me like an ever-present ghost in my relationships, which felt transactional to me even when my loved ones insisted they weren’t keeping track and were doing me favors out of love. That was easy for them to say, when I noticed it was always me who needed rides to the library to use their free printers or me who carefully calculated the cost of my meals and couldn’t afford to split the check evenly.

This year, Macey and I are celebrating our first holiday season as wives, three months after our wedding. In wedding planning, we were both clear: We wouldn’t let any insecurities or the grim hand of capitalism make us feel like we had to do anything we couldn’t or didn’t want to afford, and we didn’t go into debt to pay for any of it. Even if it meant we had to answer questions about why our reception was buffet style or why we didn’t have an open bar.

She and I are now the kind of financially comfortable I could only dream about my entire childhood, meaning we don’t have enough money to own a home and we still have mountains of student debt, but we pay all our bills on time each month and we can even afford to travel if we plan well. But as November crept closer, I still felt the pressure surrounding me just like it had when we were spending our first Christmas together. Didn’t my gifts have to be epic?

One day while Macey was at work (she commutes and I work from home), I sent her a text: What if we did a lowkey Christmas this year, just one gift and one book? We could save money to travel in 2020 and there are no physical gifts I really want.

It is an incredibly privileged position to be in, and I know that. When you have enough of a financial cushion to go on nice dates when one person gets promoted or to buy a new bookshelf as soon as you need it, holidays don’t have to be about prioritizing everything you need for the entire year. Macey and I got a lot of the home goods on our list this year between our wedding presents and a sponsored article I wrote for Bed Bath & Beyond that came with a couple thousand dollars worth of free store merchandise. We’re at a point where we have more than we can comfortably fit in our one-bedroom apartment.

But back when we were both poor or broke, Christmas could be the only time of year when we actually got big ticket items we needed, or pricey experience gifts like a couples’ massage. I once waited months to get a new purse in the hopes that Macey might get it for me in December, and another year, my Christmas gift from my dad was a fancy date for the two of us. We ate sushi at a restaurant with three dollar signs on Google, played games at Dave & Busters, and took professional photos together.

Macey texted back: That sounds good. It was harder than I expected to fight the urge to shower her with multiple expensive gifts after promising not to, especially when I came across a $1,500 moon necklace on Instagram (that I absolutely can’t afford but I know she’d love).

Our stockings this year will be filled with the promise of a two-week honeymoon in 2020 and love letters to each other. Capitalism tells me that isn’t enough, but I’m not listening.

We sought refuge in bankruptcy’s lore of the American Dream, believing in the rhetoric of fresh starts and new beginnings. However, for millions of families, debt forgiveness isn’t enough. Without a sustainable income or other necessities such as adequate health care, a bankruptcy discharge can perpetuate the cycle of debt, opening the door to unique yet systemic forms of predatory lending.

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Bankruptcy can be a powerful tool for families seeking relief from dire financial straits. Sherry Hoban, executive director for the Consumer Bankruptcy Assistance Project in Philadelphia, explained that discharging consumer debts works to the benefit of everyone. “The more people are able to take advantage of this benefit and able to discharge some of their back steps, be financially stable going forward, they will then be able to participate in the economy again to the benefit of the community,” she said.

Dr. Deborah Thorne, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Idaho, worked with Elizabeth Warren as part of the Consumer Bankruptcy Project and has studied bankruptcies for the past 25 years.

“I do think more people should file, and they should file sooner,” Thorne told me. “What happens is when they wait, they extract their wealth in ways that they shouldn’t. People are taking out from their 401(k)’s. They might be borrowing money from family members.”

Thorne, along with her colleague Dr. Katherine Porter (now Congresswoman Katherine Porter of California’s 45th District), sought to discover what happens to families like mine after they file. It’s a critical area of research that’s often ignored.

The results were startling.

According to their research, a full 25 percent of debtors continue to find themselves in a financially unstable situation post-bankruptcy. New bills plague these families even as old debts disappear. Contrary to the stigma, credit misuse does not fuel the cycle of debt in the post-discharge landscape. Mortgages, rent, utilities, and car payments keep most families underwater.

Thorne’s research found that almost one-third of filers consider their financial situations to be unchanged or worse off since their bankruptcy discharge. Declining household income triggered by illness, job loss, or advanced age could nullify the new beginnings associated with bankruptcy. And as Thorne told me, any combination of the three would most likely make the process a waste of time.

“It stops the debt collectors from harassing you,” Thorne said. “You can get a little bit of sleep for a while, and then it starts over again.”

Her research is echoed in the work of the late Dr. Song Han and Dr. Geng Li of the Federal Reserve Board. They found that not only do bankruptcy filers continue to suffer from financial distress in the short and long term, but these households tend to accumulate less wealth over time than comparable nonfilers.

And contrary to conventional wisdom, Han and Li found that the lending industry is eager to extend credit to recent bankruptcy filers, often with predatory loans that continue the cycle of debt. On average, my wife and I receive 10 credit card offers per month, not including solicitations for auto loans, payday loans, and mortgage refinances.

They’re all low-limit, high-fee cards with interest rates that would be illegal in a more fair society. Even with the caveat of those terms and conditions, I found it curious that lenders would want our business, considering we recently chose to forego paying our debts.

“[Bankruptcy filers] depend on it to make it day-to-day,” Thorne said in reference to post-discharge credit. She stressed that people were using it for necessities and not frivolous luxury goods. “And so, if you know that those people are vulnerable, heck yeah, that’s who you’re going to offer credit to.”

Dr. Benjamin Keys of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, along with Han and Li, reviewed more than 200,000 credit card solicitations and linked them to borrower credit histories. He and his colleagues found that dependent on the boom-bust cycle of the economy, lenders are using bankruptcy records, not only credit scores, to tailor offers to consumers.

In hindsight, the reasoning is logical. Following the 2005 bankruptcy bill, which added cumbersome paperwork and financial costs to bankruptcy proceedings, the time allowed between chapter 7 filings was extended from six to eight years, though after a few ups and downs, filings returned to their 1990 levels by 2016. Recent filers are more likely to receive credit because they’re barred from filing for bankruptcy again for almost a decade.

“There are elements in which getting some access to credit can help to rebuild the credit score,” said Keys cautioning me not to apply a sinister motive to the practice. “That said, these cards can have very high fees and are very high cost for what they are, which is usually a low credit limit, and in many cases, they’re secured,” which means they require a security deposit from the customer.

Keys had the opportunity to inspect these mailings through a dataset provided by the company Mintel, a process he compared to participating in the Neilsen Television rating program. Mail offers for recent bankruptcy filers, he found, were quite different than typical credit card solicitations sent to the general population.

“It acknowledges that you’ve gone through bankruptcy right away and says we still want to make you a credit offer even though you’ve gone through bankruptcy,” he told me. “We were sort of struck by how specific that was and how finely tailored it was to this population.”

A mailing I received while writing this story came from The Bankruptcy Information and Re-Establishment Center, a Better Business Bureau accredited company, promising “you’re not getting the credit you deserve” and offering to pre-qualify me for a loan right now. “Re-establishing credit after bankruptcy is the only way to save money on future financing,” read the letter before noting in bold print, “you must make a new purchase after a bankruptcy in order to re-establish credit.”

“That’s capitalism,” as Thorne explained to me quite matter-of-factly at one point in our conversation.

“I just wanted a job that paid more,” Powell explained. First Premier offered him $16 an hour in base pay, which could rise with incentive pay to $18 to $20 an hour depending on Powell’s success in collecting debts.

In a country where middle-class wages are hard to come by without a college degree, the comparatively good pay of debt collection can be a big draw. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly pay in 2018 for debt collectors was $17.32, a big step-up in pay from other lines of work such as retail sales ($12.75) or fast food ($10.89).

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71 million U.S. adults have fallen behind on a bill and now have debt in collections. According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, U.S. household debt is at an all-time high — and behind our system of easy credit are roughly 300,000 debt collectors, working for both lenders and 3rd-party collection agencies, whose job it is to recover money from American families.

These debt collectors may not match your expectations of slick-talking hucksters willing to do whatever it takes to get paid. Like many of the debtors they collect from, the collectors are often low-income themselves. While most have a high-school diploma or equivalent, some, like Powell, are teenagers. 69 percent of debt collectors are female.

At relatively low wages, debt collectors are expected to engage in what University of Brighton psychologist Carl Walker has called “mental warfare” in order to collect; the industry can leave behind scars for both the borrowers and the collectors. It’s a grueling job. In a 2016 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau survey, debt collection agencies with more than 250 employees reported an average turnover rate of 75 percent to 100 percent.

If you were born into the middle class, you’ve probably never heard of Powell’s former employer, First Premier, but it’s a major player in America’s system of subprime credit. At one point, it accounted for as much as 47 percent of all subprime credit card solicitations sent out in the United States, and now it’s the nation’s 12th biggest issuer of Mastercard credit cards.

First Premier credit cards often come with eye-popping fees. One, for example, has a $300 credit limit, a $95 one-time “program fee,” $75 in total monthly and annual fees in the first year, $120 in monthly and annual fees in all subsequent years, and a 36 percent APR. Those exorbitant prices draw in only those consumers with few other options for credit.

As Powell explained, if the borrower couldn’t pay on the spot, the collections agents at First Premier would ask for a “promise to pay.” There was folk wisdom about what different promises to pay meant: a $20 money order on the 3rd of the month meant the customer was on disability, and if it was coming on the first of the month, it meant the customer was a senior collecting Social Security. Getting a customer’s checking account credentials was ideal — it let First Premier automatically debit the customer’s bank account on the specified date — but debit and credit card payments, payments by Western Union, or money orders were all fair game as well. A lot of customers were surprised or angry about how much they owed.

The job “definitely broke you down,” said Powell. “At a certain point, you felt like you weren’t doing the right thing.” Powell “no-called, no-showed” — e.g. got fired after failing to show up to work — a little more than a year after he started. “The lion’s share [of customers] probably would have been better off if they had never opened the card,” he said.

When Chaz Fertal went in for his job interview at Checkmate in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2010, he was originally afraid he was getting duped in a Craigslist scam. Fertal showed up to an office that appeared deserted, with blacked-out windows, only to find out the building had been intentionally obscured; Checkmate was concerned that angry customers would try to track the debt collectors down. Fertal’s base pay at Checkmate was around $2,000 per month, but offered the possibility of big commission checks. Fertal says his biggest was around $4,400, meaning your pay could more than double if you were good at getting borrowers to make payments.

A current Checkmate employee confirmed over the phone that the company’s current interest rates in Arizona were as high as 180 percent per year. As Fertal explained, a customer wouldn’t actually have to make progress on paying down their debt for the Checkmate collector to earn his commission. If customers fell behind and went into collections, Fertal said he would earn commission whether he convinced them to pay the full balance or if he convinced the borrower to pay off outstanding interest while taking out a new loan. For the purposes of commission, taking on a new loan counted as “paying off” the old one.

Fertal said the incentive scheme encouraged agents to push borrowers into these loan “rollovers.” “You’d talk to a customer on the phone who after four or five months would still owe the whole amount” and they’d be outraged, Fertal said, when they realized the payments they’d made had done nothing to pay down their debt.

For Fertal, there was a clear day, he said, when he realized he didn’t want to work at Checkmate anymore. When Checkmate customers applied for loans, they typically gave Checkmate a bank account routing and account number, giving Checkmate the right to withdraw payments; if a customer went past due, the loan entered default, and, Fertal says, Checkmate would attempt to withdraw the whole outstanding loan balance from the customer’s checking account. If Checkmate wasn’t successful at withdrawing the full amount, they’d break the balance into smaller amounts and try again — Fertal said the company’s practice was to make three attempts per day, starting at 4:30 in the morning, just after any direct deposits would have landed in the borrower’s account overnight. The only way, Fertal says, a borrower could stop the process, was by making a promise to pay and providing a credit card number or debit card number to do so.

Fertal remembers one borrower well. Overnight, Fertal says, Checkmate had taken the woman’s “entire paycheck, I think it was a thousand dollars,” he says. “She had two or three kids. She told me, ‘I have nothing to feed my kids, our refrigerator is empty, they took everything.’ I went to the ACH department and they couldn’t reverse it. She told me, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, the only thing I can think of is killing myself’ — and I knew it wasn’t a lie, you could hear the loss in her voice. I remember telling her, ‘your kids need you more than anything right now, and that that’s not the answer.’ I was trying to see if there was anything we could do, even taking out a new loan, but she still had a balance on her existing loan.”

Fertal quit shortly after that phone call in 2011, and he said he still thinks about that woman and her family.

Fertal and Powell’s experiences show the toll subprime credit and debt collection industries take not only on their customers, but on the front-line agents as well. These debt collection jobs offer Americans a step up in financial security, in exchange for taking on the difficult role as intermediary between high-priced lenders and consumers in dire straits.

“The environment would just be toxic. You’d get a worse and worse impression of people,” said Fertal. “The reality is that you’re not talking with people who are in a great place in their life.”

Editor’s note: Trevor Powell asked that his name be changed for privacy.

This post has been edited to clarify Fertal’s commission earnings.

What we aren’t talking about as often is credit card debt. Consumer debt recently exceeded $4 trillion for the first time, according to the Federal Reserve. The average American has a credit card balance of $4,293 and 1 in 3 people are afraid they’ll max out their credit cards when they make a large purchase (and most defined “large” as anything over $100).

Although research shows that young people are hesitant to take on credit card debt, one survey found that there are actually more older millennials who have outstanding credit card debt than have student loan debt. Millennials are also more likely to take out personal loans, which can be used for anything from consolidating existing debt to paying for a vacation or a wedding.

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You might be thinking: Millennials can’t avoid student loan debt and a college education is worth it, but it’s downright irresponsible to take on so much credit card debt. Young people just don’t understand how credit works, or they don’t care.

The reality for many millennials with credit card debt is very different — I know, I used to be one of them.

I still remember how I felt when I picked up my mail from the box downstairs in our on-campus apartment my junior year and found my first offer to apply for a credit card, a Discover student card. I was both excited at the opportunity to manage my financial future and terrified that I would wind up trapped in a pile of debt I could never dig myself out of.

I knew that credit cards should always be used responsibly — that you should never spend money you don’t have, that it made the most sense to pay off your balance in full before the due date every month, that racking up debt could seriously damage my credit score. I also knew that in the first two years of college, I’d had to borrow money from friends more times than I could count because I needed textbooks or a bus ticket home when we were required to leave campus for breaks.

So I applied for the credit card, and within days I was approved and had a $500 credit line.

At first, I tried to manage the card responsibly, following the financial advice my dad gave me that he’d never had enough financial freedom to follow himself. I didn’t want to pay more money for items because I’d accumulated a bunch of interest. I would go to the mall with my roommates on the weekend and resist the urge to splurge on new clothes with money I didn’t have in cash or in my bank account. But it’s also exhausting constantly denying yourself happiness when you’re poor, so there were occasional times when I pulled out a credit card, like when we all went out to Japanese food to celebrate my roommate’s 20th birthday.

As I spent small amounts and paid them off quickly, Discover increased my available credit to $1,000 and sent me a free report showing that my score had improved. I remember thinking, maybe everything will be okay after all.

Then I went home for five weeks for winter break and found out my dad and I were in danger of having our heat, electricity, and internet shut off. We both pleaded with representatives on the phone to put us on a payment plan to no avail. He was a night shift cab driver who was having trouble working due to his disabilities, and he’d already been making significantly less money per month than he did before the recession because people couldn’t afford to take cabs anymore.

“I’ll pay the bills if you can pay me back at least some of it,” I offered. At school, I was living off a stipend thanks to grants and scholarships. I also had two on-campus tutoring jobs that paid a little more than minimum wage in Massachusetts, which gave me enough spending money to put gas in my car and pay my phone bill each month.

We needed heat through the winter, and I needed the internet to research summer jobs and internships and get started on my senior thesis. I paid our bills with my credit card and cringed when I saw my available credit start to disappear. One study found that 1 in 5 millennials are helping to financially support their aging parents, and giving their parents an average of $18,250 a year. One third of that financial assistance goes toward living expenses such as food and housing.

The reality is that being poor is expensive. Every time I’d just about caught up with the latest round of credit card charges — $150 here for an emergency car repair on my 1998 Buick Century, $50 there on a book that the professor didn’t put on the syllabus before the semester started, $200 to pay off overdue bills to help my dad — something else would come up.

And then, during the fall of my senior year, my dad suffered from a traumatic brain injury during an on-the-job car accident. While it had been difficult for him to work before, now it was nearly impossible. As a cab driver, he was an independent contractor, not an employee, so he didn’t have any of the protections employees can get, like paid medical leave or unemployment benefits. If he couldn’t work, he simply wasn’t paid. The meager stipend and part-time jobs I had weren’t enough to keep us both afloat in an emergency.

The credit card charges mounted. When things were getting really desperate and our heat was about to be turned off in the middle of winter again, I even applied for a predatory payday loan online. I was denied because my credit score had dropped thanks to my high balances. I sat in my bed, covered in as many blankets as possible, wondering how cold the apartment would get if we didn’t have heat. Eventually, after searching the internet, I found another scammy credit card company that would give me a credit line of $400 in minutes with an APR of 29.9 percent.

By the time I’d become too untrustworthy to qualify for another line of credit, I had almost $5,000 in credit card debt across six cards and no plans to pay it off. My highest interest rate was 30.49 percent. I barely survived my senior year of college and first year after graduation, making only the $25 and $35 minimum payments on each card respectively.

I was only able to start tackling my debt when I began working full-time and freelancing on the side. I was really fortunate that I lived with my partner, so we shared bills and expenses and helped each other out during tough financial situations. She graduated with more student debt than I did, including a couple of private loans, so our priorities were paying off her highest interest student loans and my predatory credit cards as soon as possible. She also understood my frustration with credit, as she fell into a similar trap with her credit card after she was suddenly laid off from her first post-college job.

With our two incomes, we finally had enough for necessities with some to spare. Every month, I would throw more than the minimum payment at my credit cards, starting with those with the highest interest rates and balances. Whenever I had an unexpected amount of money, like if I got more well-paying freelance work that month or I received a bonus at work, I’d funnel $200-500 into paying off another card.

In December 2018, I sent in the last payment to the first credit card I opened from Discover back in 2013. With that payment, I’d paid off all my credit cards in full. I never thought I’d sign in and see a $0 balance due again; I no longer have to worry about years of interest fees piling up on what was originally a $50 purchase. My credit score also improved (although marginally) and I’m finally in the average bracket instead of poor, an assessment that feels even more ironic when I think about the fact that I’ve been poor my entire life and I’m only now just catching up to middle class.

I’m still a little scared to use my credit cards now, even responsibly. Last month at the checkout at Target, I used my store credit card for the first time in years, saving 5 percent off my total purchase. When the balance popped up in my account in a few days, I paid it in full 10 days before the due date.