Debt
Debts keeping you up at night: what to do?
Get the debt out of your head and onto paper, pick one step for tomorrow, talk to someone, and get help if anguish turns to despair. You are not your debt.
Three in the morning, eyes open, your head doing sums that don't add up. Debt has that power: it grows in the dark and shrinks in the light. This page is for the night when it seems bigger than you.
What to do now
- Get the debt out of your head and onto paper. Take a notebook and write everything down: creditor, amount, date. In your head, the debt is infinite; on paper, it has a size. And what has a size can be faced.
- Choose just one step for tomorrow. Not "solve everything." One step: call a creditor, check the Central Bank's Registrato, book an appointment at Procon. Write down the step and the time. Then leave the notebook closed until morning.
- Make the night work in your favor. Phone away from the bed, no opening banking apps after ten. If you can't sleep, get up, breathe slowly for a few minutes, drink some water and go back. The problem won't be solved in the middle of the night.
- Talk to someone. A spouse, a friend, someone from your community. Hidden debt creates a second weight, the weight of the secret. Shared, the load gets lighter and ideas appear.
- Use the help that exists. Procon, the Public Defender's Office and the over-indebtedness conciliation centers (Law 14,181/2021) serve you for free. Serasa Limpa Nome and consumidor.gov.br let you negotiate from your phone.
- Protect your body. Eat at regular times, walk, get some sun. Someone exhausted decides worse, and you need to decide well.
- Know when it's more than worry. If the anguish keeps you from working, if you haven't slept in weeks, if the thought comes that it would be better to disappear, get help now. CVV answers at 188, free, 24 hours a day, and by chat at cvv.org.br. Your city's primary health unit (UBS) and psychosocial care center (CAPS) provide care through SUS. If you are in immediate danger, SAMU at 192.
When it happened to Bairo
Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows what a night like that is like. He says that, after an investment that didn't hold, he was left without money and with many people depending on him. He speaks of those people as lives, not as numbers.
What he found at that bottom was not an immediate financial solution. It was a flame, of hope and of faith, that he says never went out completely. In a Christian congregation, listening to testimonies from ordinary people who had crossed through the impossible, he came to believe again that the story could go on. With respect for those who don't believe, this is how he tells it: faith was what kept him standing until the next day.
The path
Debt can take your money, but it doesn't have to take your sleep, your health and your family with it. You are not what you owe. Bairo says every no is the ground of a yes: tonight, the "no" can be not solving anything in the middle of the night. Tomorrow, with the notebook in hand and someone by your side, the yes begins.
If you share a bed with someone, make a simple agreement: debt is not discussed after the lights go out. Set a fixed time each week, in daylight, to look at the bills together. That protects both of your sleep and turns the debt into a problem for the couple, not a shadow each one carries in secret. Many families come out of the crisis more united precisely because they learned to talk about money.