Photo: g-stockstudio (Getty)
These days everyone wants to be “Instagram famous,” and that’s mainly because it just includes you taking photos and making money off that and promoting garbage. Well one woman learned the hard way that trying to become famous off nothing can cost you.
Lissette Calveiro, a 26-year-old who moved from Miami to New York City in 2013 for an internship, wanted to be rich and famous. So what did she do? She began buying stuff using a credit card. A lot of stuff. Calveiro assumed she would be able to pay it all back when she became Instagram famous. Yep.
She accepted a full time job as a publicist, her quest for social media stardom sank her into $10,000 of debt, thanks to monthly shopping sprees that she couldn’t afford, which included things like $1,000 Louis Vuitton purses.
To drain her bank account even more, she felt the need to prove to her followers that she could travel in style, so she’d take monthly trips to places like Austin, L.A., the Bahamas, and Las Vegas.
“Snapchat had these [geo-] filters and I wanted to collect at least 12,” Calveiro said. “If you break it down, a lot of the travel I was doing in 2016 was strictly for Instagram.”
Well, when she realized she wasn’t exactly a millionaire and was swiftly going broke, she stopped spending excessively, and toned down her constant splurges. “I knew that moving to New York, I had to get my act together or I wasn’t going to survive.”
Calveiro realized she was never going to be Instagram famous and started living frugally, eventually paying off her debt in a little over a year. She now lives with two roomies and pays $1,300 a month in rent.
“Nobody talks about finances on Instagram,” Calveiro says. “It worries me how much I see girls care about image. I had a lot of opportunities to save. I could’ve invested that money in something.”
So this gal wanted to collect Snapchat “geo-filters” so badly, and she wanted to show off her “life of luxury” so much that she ended up drowning in debt. If there’s something to be learned from all this is that being Instagram famous is probably not something you want to aim for in life. Instead go to college, get in debt the normal way by taking out school loans and then get a nine-to-five job and be miserable like the rest of us.
