00:03Let me know when the cross changes.
00:06Back then, when people liked my Instagram posts,
00:08I would get really giddy, tingly, and excited.
00:11I'm Lisette, and I racked up $10,000 of debt
00:14trying to become an Instagram influencer.
00:16I remember any time I would post travel content,
00:19it performed the best.
00:20So I spent a lot of money going to places in the Southwest
00:24like Austin, Texas, Nashville.
00:26I had no actual interest in Nashville.
00:28I could don't listen to country music, and then I was like,
00:31but the Nashville wall is so pretty.
00:33I spent about $700 on a plane ticket,
00:36and when I went, I took a ton of pictures.
00:39Posting something and seeing the ticker of likes and comments,
00:42it almost became like an addiction.
00:54This little space is where I keep designer bags
00:57that I kept over the years.
00:59This red one would be the $1,000 bag that I spent money on.
01:03This is fun. I bought this shirt twice.
01:06I loved it so much I bought it twice.
01:08When I first started having an Instagram presence,
01:11it was really about just showing off experiences.
01:14Here's a cool flat lay of a restaurant.
01:17Here's a place I'm traveling to.
01:19Here's a cool new outfit.
01:20So this bag is the bag that I had spent over $1,000 on.
01:26One of the first big ticket items I bought was a Louis Vuitton bag.
01:31It was something I wanted to post immediately, and so I did.
01:34When I went to go photograph this to share it on my Instagram,
01:38I actually went to a Chipotle that was nearby
01:41and put the bag against a brick wall and took this photo.
01:44So it was kind of like champagne dreams on a Chipotle budget.
01:48I was really just purchasing it
01:50because I wanted to share it with the world
01:52versus enjoying it for myself.
02:00So whenever I traveled, I would take a Polaroid with me.
02:03This is DC, Nashville, Germany.
02:10In the past three years, I've traveled to 12 countries
02:13and more than 120,000 miles of just back and forth air travel.
02:19That's five times around Earth.
02:24I remember my first salary being $30,000.
02:28So spending $400 on clothes every month
02:31or taking $1,000 trips every so often
02:34is definitely something that kind of salary could not afford.
02:38I accrued about $8,000 to $12,000 of debt on my credit cards.
02:42That doesn't include things I spent anyway with my cash.
02:49I had about six credit cards and about three retail credit cards.
02:54Every time I got a new card, it's because I maxed out one of them.
02:58One card that I had, I have a 2017 statement
03:01where it's at about $3,000.
03:04Another card at $1,300.
03:07The highest one I'm seeing is $4,376.69.
03:14It wasn't until I could finally kind of look at them this way
03:17that I realized it's a lot more debt than I thought about.
03:20A lot of these purchases, a lot of these travel,
03:23were really just to show it off on Instagram.
03:30When I was getting out of debt, I definitely had a ton of side hustles.
03:35Instagram was something that was growing,
03:36so I could make a couple hundred dollars off of that.
03:39I tried to freelance consult.
03:41I sold a lot of clothes on things like Poshmark.
03:44I also loved dog sitting.
03:46I love dogs.
03:47Fast forward, you can see March of 2018, one card is at zero.
03:54Another one is at $200.
03:56Another one is at zero.
03:58It took me about 18 months to get out of debt completely,
04:02and that was just a result of paying my credit card bills
04:06as a priority to everything else.
04:11So that's a photo shoot trick if you're shooting in the cold.
04:15You put the hand warmers in.
04:18I don't even have sunglasses.
04:21It's just a really guerrilla photo shoot here.
04:24I grew about 15,000 followers just through telling my story
04:28about being in debt and coming out of it
04:30and the pressures of social media.
04:33Wait, let me just check the lighting.
04:37If you look at my career today,
04:39I definitely would not be where I am
04:41if I had not created an Instagram and blog presence for myself.
04:45People wanted to use me for my back-end experience
04:48of being an influencer.
04:54I didn't regret the places I traveled to
04:57or the restaurants I ate at,
04:59but I could have waited to do that
05:00when it didn't feel like a burden.
05:02It's just paying for a lifestyle that's above your means.
05:04Well, we're gonna die.
05:07We're gonna die.
05:08We want people to think you're living
05:10the most glamorous New York life
05:12and just all the pressures of social media
05:14that make you just continuously spend.
05:16I think that's the most dangerous,
05:17but you're spending without really noticing.
05:27will be the next week,
