I’m not rich. What I have, I built carefully. That matters to the story.
The alert came on a Tuesday in February. It was from a service I’d signed up for eighteen months earlier after a coworker mentioned it — one of those credit-monitoring services that sends you emails when your report changes. I had honestly forgotten about it most of the time. The email subject line said “New account detected” and I opened it the way you open those things, slightly annoyed, expecting it to be a store card I’d opened and forgotten or some automatic thing that had triggered the alert for a non-reason.
It was a personal loan. $28,000. Opened approximately eleven months earlier, in my name, with my Social Security number, using an address I had not lived at since I was twenty.
I sat with that email for probably four minutes before I moved. I was at my kitchen table and I remember my coffee was getting cold and I was looking at the number and trying to construct a universe in which this made any sense — where I had taken out a $28,000 personal loan and somehow completely forgotten about it.
I could not construct that universe. I had never taken out a personal loan in my life.
## What I Had and What I Thought
My credit was not great. It was not terrible either — it was somewhere in the low-to-mid range of okay, the kind of credit score that takes work to build and that I had been building carefully because the down-payment plan required it.