Rodney Morgan sat on a blowup mattress with his head in one hand. Over him on the screen sat one number, $40,058.44. He's a 33-year-old flight attendant in Los Angeles, and that was his debt. He posted it in July. A million and a half people watched.
His usual flight-attendant videos topped out around 100,000 views. This one did 1.5 million. He's not alone. More than 28,000 debt videos went up on TikTok in the 12 months through September, by the count of Tubular Labs, which tracks social video. The Journal's Dalvin Brown calls the corner #DebtTok. The recipe has two steps. You say the exact amount you owe. Then you keep coming back to show whether it went up or down.
The guru is gone
Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey built careers taking calls from people in money trouble. TikTok drops the expert. The person who owes the money holds the camera. Brittney Castro, a planner at the banking app Chime, compares it to a movie. People want to watch someone take on a big obstacle and win. A Cornell professor who studies social media puts it less kindly. People enjoy judging how others handle money, then checking their own habits against it. It's gossip with a running total.
Tianna Carter, 31, runs human resources for a public school district in Harrisburg, Pa. She owes $54,057.93 and records an update every night, sometimes at 10 p.m. in her kitchen. One commenter scolded her for getting her hair done. She didn't cave. Her answer was to call the salon a fixed cost. The savings come from somewhere else, like a packed lunch. Kayla Rose, 29, told followers in March that she owed more than $25,000 on credit cards. Her audience grew as she talked about it. By August the cards were paid off.
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Here's the part that's easy to miss. Rose paid her cards off with money from the videos. Carter puts her post income toward daycare and the debt. Morgan's biggest sponsorship yet, from a personal-finance app, is expected to wipe out the roughly $800 left on the Home Depot (HD) and Lowe's (LOW) store cards from his remodel. The crowd isn't just cheering. For a lucky few, the crowd is the income. That part doesn't transfer. What does transfer is cheaper and older than TikTok. Say the real number out loud. Tell one person who'll ask about it next month. Decide what you refuse to cut, then cut around it. That's Cash Flow M5 with a Behavioral engine, and it works with zero views.
So here's your check this week. Pull up every balance you carry, the cards, the store cards, the car. Write the total on one line, to the penny, the way Morgan put his on the screen. Most people have never seen their own number in one place. Then pick your Carter rule, the one expense you keep, and name the one you'll trim to pay for it. You don't need an audience for that. You need the number. If you'd like a second set of eyes on the list, that's what a review is for. We'd rather you find the umbrella on a dry week in October than in the first real storm.