Assassinate NINJA Debt with a Rummage Sale

Are you a ninja? Have you fallen into running with the wrong, spendthrift crowd? Do you wish you could just take a kusarigama to your credit card debt? Well an article on Fox Business has some simple advice for you: clean out your basement and hold a rummage sale, silly!

Ninjas and NINJA Debt: Both Silent Killers. Photo by Seth W./flickr

First, a point of clarification: where I said “ninja,” Fox Business wrote “NINJA.” They say toe-MAY-toe, I say toe-MAH-toe. But there is a difference. According to Fox Business, NINJA credit—in the bad old days—was extended to consumers with “No Income, No Job, No Assets.” As I read it, that’s one letter more than a proper acronym, but “NINJNA credit” is far less catchy (and, to be honest, sounds a little licentious).

Anyhow, if you or someone you know is a ninja, or has an unsustainable amount of NINJA debt, you don’t have to live your life in the shadows anymore. In six easy steps, you can escape your history of mercenary spending and, according to Fox Business, avoid debt collection calls.

Fox Business says, “Here are some smart strategies to help you get your financial life back on track.”

1. Don’t panic (yep)
2. Unload “stuff” (RUMMAGE SALE!!!)
3. Call your bank (and while you’re at it, call your mother too)
4. Use balance transfer offers wisely (heard the one about robbing Peter to pay Paul)
5. Avoid payday loans (unless you like 1,000,000% interest)
6. Ask for help (because we all can use a little now and then)

All kidding aside, these are relatively sound recommendations for consumers. I, myself, like the rummage sale suggestion best. There’s nothing like staring out across a table, piled high with reasonably priced books written by some of the world’s greatest thinkers—books that consumed countless hours and every penny of disposable income you might have had in graduate school—and having to say, “Why yes, grouchy old lady who showed up 45 minutes before the craigslist add said the sale would start, I will accept 75 cents for my copy of Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond because there’s a coffee ring on the cover.” (Not that I write from personal experience or anything.) But these, I suppose, are the wages of sin (and being a NINJA).

I’d add one more practical suggestion for ex-NINJA Rummage Sale Survivors. Once you have mastered Fox Business’s six steps on the righteous path of personal finance, consider this: stop buying all this junk you don’t really need.

Michael Klozotsky is the Chief Content Officer at insideARM.com. He highly recommends Takashi Miike’s outstanding 2010 film, 13 Assassins.