Instagram can be a valuable tool for improving your skills, but it can have a negative impact on your wellbeing, too. It all depends what you take from it and how you use it. But did you know using Instagram can set you back for a serious amount of money? A young woman named Lissette Calveiro learned it the hard way. She went $10,000 into debt after trying to live a life of an Instagram celebrity.
Lissette moved to New York from Miami in 2013 for an internship. As she tells the New York Post, she wanted to tell her story of a young millennial living in New York. She admits that she was living above her means, which eventually led her to the $10,000 debt.
Looking up to Instagram influencers, Lissette was trying to keep up with their way of life. She shared her “glamorous” life on the social network, showing off her new outfits, pricey bags and travels. She admittedly traveled to new locations just so she could look like a jet-setter. She went to Las Vegas, Cuba, Los Angeles and other places, sharing her travels with the 12K followers she had at the time. If she only knew about this company, it would have spared her some cash. “I was living a lie,” Lissette told the New York Post. And indeed, while her life on Instagram seemed glamorous, the reality was quite different. She was struggling financially, and her internship only covered transportation costs. She was living on her savings, and eventually found a part-time retail job. In fall 2013, she moved back to Miami and found a full-time job. Even then, she used most of her salary on fancy dinners, shopping, and travels. All this got her sink into debt. Towards the end of 2016, Lissette had a reality check and decided to change her lifestyle. “I knew that moving to New York, I had to get my act together or I wasn’t going to survive,” she tells the New York Post. She started rationalizing her spending and isolated herself from the world a bit. She slowed down her Instagram activity, and she says she started recycling her content. After the experience that painfully taught her what the “glamorous Instagram life” requires, Lissette says: “Nobody talks about finances on Instagram. It worries me how much I see girls care about image.” She regrets wasting so much money and she believes that she could have invested it into something. Honestly, I don’t get the whole culture of showing off your “glamorous life” on social networks. I know a couple of people who do it, and I know how their real life looks like – it’s far from being glamorous. I don’t understand why someone would want to live in a lie and have others believe in it. But that’s just me. On the other hand, I do realize this is a trend. Some travel fashion bloggers actually profit from sharing their life on social media and they get sponsored. So, perhaps Lissette was just supposed to play it smarter if she wanted to pull it off. [via the New York Post]
