Quit coveting your colleague's BMW, Porsche, expensive vacations and sprawling house behind the gates. While you're at it, stop wishing you had your neighbor's Chanel shades, Prada bag and that fancy golf club membership.

You know you can't afford it. What you might not know is neither can they.

It's pretty easy to become envious of another person's cool stuff, but the truth is most people borrow heavily to finance their bling.

“To a great extent, people are using debt to support their lavish lifestyles nowadays,” said Shira Boss, author of “Green With Envy: Why Keeping Up with the Joneses is Keeping Us in Debt.”

“We have really raised our standard of living based on credit,” she said.

Surely, you've seen the Lending Tree commercial featuring Mr. In Debt Up to My Eyeballs, aka Stanley Johnson.
Riding around on a lawnmower, he explains that the only way he can afford his huge house, new car and golf club membership is through debt. He can barely pay the finance charges each month, he says in a desperate plea for help.

It's a scenario playing out in neighborhoods across the U.S.
 
The couple with the four-bedroom house, a pair of new luxury foreign automobiles and a seemingly endless array of designer duds — the couple everyone wants to be — is also the one with a growing mound of credit card bills, a second mortgage and a maxed out home equity line of credit.

“Appearances are deceiving,” Boss said, sharing the story of a neighbor couple who seemingly had everything — a mortgage-free Manhattan apartment, a car in an oasis of public transportation and the money for one of them to quit working.

In reality, the neighbors quickly took out a mortgage on the apartment they had bought outright to help cover other debts. The wife put her shopping sprees on a credit card she kept secret from her husband and fretted over how to make the minimum payments.

The couple, like most people, just couldn't afford the bling they wanted.

Boss eventually came to the realization that she was trying to keep up with the Joneses when the Joneses don't exist. The have-it-all, financial worry-free lifestyle her neighbors seemed to have was only an illusion.

It often is.

There may be a Louis Vuitton bag over a woman's shoulder, a Lexus in her driveway and a pair of Cowboys season tickets in her husband's front shirt pocket, but there's a pretty good chance it's all there courtesy of MasterCard, Visa, American Express and perhaps a bank or two.

Debt — it's what makes the world go around.