I’m trying to imagine a worse set-up for creating a hatefest in the comments at Salon than this article, and all I can come up with is that if there were children involved, it might give the haters another excuse to go nuts. But as it is, the article is by a single woman living in New York who has behaved irresponsibly and is not currently giving oral sex to any of the commenters at Salon, a perfect storm to create an avalanche of hatred with overtones of insinuation that this is evidence that all women everywhere are too simple-minded to be permitted to live outside of male authority. I’m writing this paragraph before reading the comments as a little bet with myself, to see if my prediction skills on this are adequate.
The woman’s sin is to live way outside her means for a number of years, racking up $10,000 in credit card debt. She freely admits that she did not have a huge expense like a medical bill to blame. She just had a lifestyle she couldn’t afford at a 30% interest rate. She’s responsible, and she’s taking measures to fix her problem, but the article also subtly drives home the point that there’s something deeply fucked up about our usury laws that we allow something like a 30% interest rate to even exist. (The article reminded me to pay off a balance sitting on my credit card, however. Paying even a nickel in interest to these sharks crosses a deeply held moral boundary.) It also reminds the thinking reader, in light of the recent plot to goose the economy with a check mailed out to everyone in working class consumerland, how much our economy is built on consumer debt incurred by working class people. It’s easy to wag our fingers at people who charge a bunch of stuff they can’t afford, but if people quit doing it all at once, the stock market would probably crash.
But like I said, this woman set herself to be a scapegoat. And now, having made that bet with myself, I’m going to read the comments……
….and I find myself mildly surprised at the ratio of sympathetic comments to slagging. I mean, there’s plenty of nastiness that feeds right into the Dictionary Of Words You Use Against Single Women Who Don’t Fuck You, like this:
Come on. This article was a waste of space. I cannot muster sympathy. For someone like Tacroy, certainly. Tacroy’s story needs telling. But putting yourself into deep debt through bar tabs, lattes, and CDs… yes, you’re spoiled and kind of dumb…..
But then here comes Sarah explaining that, yup, she’s a ditz who spent out of control on luxury items and just hide the bills in a sock drawer. Tee hee.
But most of the comments were sympathetic. It feels kind of private reading them, though, like sitting in at an AA meeting. A lot of people have overwhelming debt out there. Some incurred it through “acceptable” means, like having huge medical bills or losing a job or something, but there’s also a lot of stories about people simply getting railroaded by the fucking 30% interest rates. The credit card companies have perfected their exploitation of people by making the minimum monthly payments attractively low. It’s easy to say to yourself that you’re going to pay just the minimum just this time because money’s tight this month, but money is tight every month and next thing you know, your payments to the credit card company are a pittance, not doing a damn thing to reduce the amount of debt you have because the interest is just compounding rapidly. A number of people make addiction references, which is why the collective purge has an AA feel to it. The article itself reminded me of a narrative about trying to face up to the fact that you’re dating an abusive loser.
I was so broke, in fact, that I actually had no idea how broke I was. The exact number had become a mystery, something hidden (or, rather, stuffed) in the closet: I didn’t know how much I owed on those credit cards, or how much was in my bank account, or whether that balance — were I to check it online, which I did not do that month — would be positive or negative. I knew I owed several thousand. Five freaking digits. The evidence sat in a neat stack of unopened credit card bills, which had been piling up next to the French press since October. The evidence came in the form of phone calls from bill collectors, from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., calls that I never answered.
If this sounds like breezy indifference, if it seems that I was not worried, then good; I fooled you. I was desperately trying to pretend that my financial plight did not bother me. Who wants to confront such colossal failure? Besides, it was the holidays. Gifts and parties and free champagne. Every day the mail brought Christmas cards with pictures of friends’ babies doing adorable, uncanny things. The mail also brought bills. The pictures went on the fridge. The bills? They went into the stack.
In my apartment, alone, I had fits of anxiety. Tears, clenched fists, the works. I lay bug-eyed at 4 a.m., wondering how I was going to get out of this mess. I needed more time. I needed more work.
Replace the letters with receipts from hotels, foreign panties, and lipstick stains and replace the late night collection agency phone calls with phone calls from the mistress you’re trying to ignore, and this story isn’t remarkably different from that of a woman in denial about the fact that her husband is cheating on her. I can face up to it tomorrow, can’t I? Initiating the divorce during the holidays would be so disruptive.
And this guy nails it, though the weird sexual metaphor is off-putting and unnecessary.
If the majority of the US population starts developing the spending discipline and tight belt the many of the posters (wisely, I most add) describe here, The US “economy” is going to tank. Yes, you heard me.
The motor of the US economy is people living beyond their means.
One of the biggest business in Wall Street is the financial sector, which plainly means deceiving people into buying what they cannot afford, with money they don’t have and making them pay dearly the rest of their life. After slavery was abolished, creative forms of servitude had to be invented.
For most of the 20th century the same trick was applied to under develop nations to the point the the creditor (World Bank, IMF) eventually arrogated themselves the power to dictate laws an internal policies: Open your legs to foreign investment honey, it will hurt just a bit. Nations with enough natural resources (oil) that could afford to be disobedient and tell the Lords to take a hike, have to be subdued by more traditional ways (Conquest by an army).
Now the Trade barons look nervously to China, and slyly advice Chinese workers that instead of saving 50% of their salaries, each person now should buy two chevie cars each and stock up in plasma TVs so they can be as free and as happy as Americans are.
That the victim of exploitation was insufficiently protective of herself doesn’t excuse the exploitation, but most of the time, people seem to think it does, particularly if said victim is female. On one hand, it was heartening to read a comment thread where people actually grasped this basic concept. On the other hand, it speaks to how prevalent this problem is. People have empathy not because humanity suddenly got a dose of, well, humanity, but because they understand the problem intimately because they are suffering, too.
94 Responses to “The nation owes its soul to the company store”
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As a friend put it succinctly, the U.S. economy is based on growth. That’s fine when real wages are steadily increasing, but once that stops happening, as it has, debt is the only way to maintain spending increases. This creates other problems, including the devaluation of the dollar, etc. It’s a bad scene and I don’t think any one knows what the hell to do about it.
I have not read the article yet, but as harsh as our usury law might be, requiring institutions to charge less interest would severely limit some people, especially the poor to have access to money. I know most people will think that this is just pure and simple exploitation of the poor, but look even to the Grameen Bank, which Yunus won a nobel peace prize for. Under our flexible usury laws such micro-credit schemes would not be allowed because the interest they require, sometimes around 50%, is simply too high, but if they were not allowed such high interest rates then investors would not be willing to take the risk and the entire Nobel Peace Prize winning micro-credit industry would cease to exist. I just do not think it should be so easy to praise a high-interest scheme abroad, even awarding a Nobel Prize, and then attack domestic lenders who are providing money to people who are equally bad credit risks.
But microcredit is a lot different, because it’s still based in a sort of collateral system. The loans are not given out to purchase consumer goods, but to start businesses, and they aren’t given to individuals but small communities. I don’t know if it’s fair to compare microcredit to blatant usury.
Robin, you’re just off-base.
Micro-credit is used to capitalize businesses.
Credit card usury in this country is not. Specifically, having bootstrapped two businesses on my credit cards, I can tell you that if you are truthful about the fact that you’re using the credit card issuer as your financing, they can yank your 12% ‘good credit’ interest rate and jack you to 31%.
It’s perfectly legal, or so the lawyer I consulted about it told me, because the user agreement I signed to get the credit required me to promise to only spend it on consumable crap (translated from the legalese for your reading pleasure).
So yeah, CitiBank and Grameen Bank are just alike except that one is a banana and the other one is a stepstool. To choose two random objects I’m looking at as my example.
I don’t know, are people who rack up credit card debts in this way really being ‘exploited’? It doesn’t seem that way to me, but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.
I have never understood what is so hard about not accumulating consumer debt (student loans and medical debts are obviously different, because those are more or less required costs and aren’t influenced in any meaningful way by financial self-discipline). Do people just…want more things, want them badly enough to override their financial sense (and is that a case of their discipline being weak, rather than their desire being strong)?
Why is it apparantly so hard to tell yourself, “No, I can’t afford that”?
Can someone explain that to me?
Actually, now that I think about it, it’s not so much about discipline overriding desire, as it is about having a mindset that reduces the desire to Have New Stuff. All my furniture is hand-me-downs, but I don’t feel any shame for not having it all match. I’ve got no desire to keep up with the Joneses, I don’t need new shoes until the old ones wear out, I don’t need a fancy new computer or spinnas on my car. I buy store brands and don’t feel bad about it. I guess if I was really concerned about all these things, I’d find it a lot harder to save money, too.
Betsy,
My kudos to you’re friend for distilling the essence of the problem so succinctly.
One of the fundamental facets of capitalism that people miss is that the economic growth everyone wants is totally dependent on increasing consumption, and when workers have seen their incomes stagnate for 30 years the only way for them to consume more is through debt. Without those people living beyond their means that everyone loves to scold the U.S. economy would already be in a depression.
But while this explosion of consumer debt was essential to neo-liberal economic growth, it came bearing its own teeth. When U.S. consumers actually do what the moral scolds want, that is, tighten their belts and stop spending beyond their means, it can only mean a recession worse than any since the great depression and the political realization by the majority that without that debt, they’ve seen essentially NONE of the benefit from 30 years of economic growth.
The credit card industry has evolved into a sick, predatory game of gotcha where they actively seek to find reasons to squeeze everything they can out of their
serfscustomers. If you miss one payment on credit card “A” then credit card “b” can and will lower your limit (further fucking your credit rating b/c one component is % of maximum balance) in addition to jacking your interest rates. Your history with bank “b” is irrelevant.So true, Amanda, so true. Blatant usury is a very accurate descriptor for the corporate credit card industry.
It isn’t just that the credit card companies charge high interest rates: they also stack the deck against consumers to charge as many late fees as possible and raise the rates on the flimsiest excuse (like, if you have a late payment on some completely unrelated account for any reason–even a disputed debt–they can raise your rates).
I think the deceptive terms, unethical billing practices, and downright fraud are more the problem than the actual rates themselves. Employees have testified that their “job” was to make sure the consumer never, ever pays off that debt. I’m not an expert on the Grameen Bank, but I doubt they have the same goal of encouraging debt slavery through fraud.
Back on topic: I cannot recommend the movie Maxed Out enough.
It’s a documentary that addresses the question, How did we become a nation of debtors with lots of shiny stuff in houses we don’t really own any of?
I’m working on a bill that will restrict certain kinds of lending practices in my state, and I wish like hell that I could make the 11 legislators who have to decide what to do watch this 90 minute film. Because they don’t understand how it could happen that someone who looks like they think of themselves, on the surface–middle class with money they earned rather than directly inherited, etc.–could possibly make these financial management mistakes.
And our entire economy is running on this secret fuel of ‘personal’ debt, which has shame attached to it and is therefore not conceived of as reflecting structural problems.
Debt is the domestic violence of this century, I swear. Once the people who are ‘choosing to stay’ in a dysfunctional relationship with the financial services industry realize they have been duped, we will start to be able to fix this mess. Until then, it’s a private, household matter that is none of your business.
It’s interesting about the shame aspect. I remember hearing a report on NPR a couple of years ago about personal debt. The reporter mentioned that some of the people they interviewed for the story worked at the NSA or the CIA (I forget which). They were there doing another piece on national security and asked them a few questions about personal debt as well for the debt piece.
Get this: those people were willing to speak on the record about matters of national security, but not about their own personal debts.
And your credit record can be used against you in situations like that — if you have unmanageable debt and you’re in the military or you have a security clearance, you become a security problem. Because you might do something to get yourself out of debt like sell information. Even if you just have a civilian job, your bad credit can keep you from getting a better job if that employer runs your credit and thinks you’re irresponsible.
Does anyone know what the gender breakdown on credit card debt is? Had an interesting conversation with an former professor where he was asking me. He was convinced that debt was going to turn out to be a very gendered issue. That women don’t make as much money as men, but their costs are higher. Clothes are more expensive (and less long-lasting). Women pay a premium for apartments in safe neighborhoods and cars that won’t break down. In many fields, the required beauty upkeep alone is staggering (especially when compared to salary).
It’s easy to blame this on foolish spending on “luxuries,” but when we talk about the pressure on young women to be “effortlessly hot,” we should also consider the similar requirement to be “effortlessly financed.” Earning less money than a man? No, not me! Look at my lattes and ipod!
When so many people (women) are having the same problems, individual weakness and lack of willpower aren’t really the problem.
Models and actresses can claim beauty treatments as business expenses on their taxes. Women who have normal jobs, but are expected to meet the “ideals” they represent can’t.
I just want to close my eyes and never open them again sometimes.
I have credit card debt, but it’s not that that scares me; it’s my mounting education debt. Every year more loans supplant grants, and I’m not generating income nor do I know when this is all going to end or if, when it finally does, I’ll be able to pay it.
I just can’t bear to think about it. It’s such a sad story here that even in the pursuit of enrichment, even in the effort to get ahead, we can’t help but fall behind.
“…it can only mean a recession worse than any since the great depression and the political realization by the majority that without that debt, they’ve seen essentially NONE of the benefit from 30 years of economic growth.”
There are two American economies, and most of us have been part of the American Economy that has not been growing.
All of the growth in the economy has been at the upper end, the modern day Robber Barons (we call them CEOs, etc.) who have streamlined the entire system to funnel money into their pockets. Much/most of their money is not even spent, and what is spent often ends up supporting boutique luxury items that give little back to the community.
“Real People” would and should be able to spend disposable income on consumer goods. But when you go into debt to support the habit…not good. And, of course, not sustainable.
When the economy gets sick, as it’s been doing for the last decade or so, the huge outstanding debt will make the coming recession really ugly.
“Without those people living beyond their means that everyone loves to scold the U.S. economy would already be in a depression.”
Unfortunately I think a Depression is exactly what we are headed for.
I used to figure that I and my family could ride out just about any economic downturn - I’m not so confident now. I’m wondering if learning Mandarin right about now would be a very useful way to spend any free time I have…
Absolutely the credit card companies are out of control and need to be better regulated. Poor people who need a financial jolt in the short-term need access to services other than credit cards with ridiculous interest rates.
But this article, as far as I can tell, was not written by a poor person. Woman or man, I can’t feel sorry for people who spend beyond their means when those means are pretty reasonable.
People don’t rationalize buying a new pair of shoes every month with “I’m helping grow the US economy!” The rationalize it with “Those look good, and I’m going to a party next week anyway.” Certainly the US economy relies on overspending to grow, but that’s not why individuals get into consumer debt, and it’s not appropriate to let individuals point the figure at society when they suddenly realize they’re in over their heads.
MH
I’ve significantly averaged less than $20,000 a year for my entire adult life. That’s little more than $1,000 a month. What with the housing boom, average rent is about $800 in my area for a single bedroom. Plus car payments, insurance, gas, and several hundred dollars in student loans to pay each month. You do the fucking math.
All my credit card debt is from 2 things: 1) groceries, clothes, and other necessities from the one year I tried not living in my parents house and the 2) class I took last year (non-matriculated from a Cal-State, so no students loans) that helped me get the job I have now. Thankfully, I may finally be able to move out (which will improve my parents sanity as well as my own) but I still can’t afford to do that and pay down my debt.
Seriously, fuck off.
Although “universal default” — the fine print that kicks your credit-card rate up to 30% if the phone company misplaces your check — has mostly gone out of fashion, there are plenty of other mostly reasonable ways to get socked with usurious rates. And once you’re in that condition, 30% annual rates (plus penalties and fees) make it ever so much harder to get back out. Suddenly the payment plan that was going to get you debt-free in a couple of years is going to take more like three or four — assuming nothing else happens in the meantime.
And if your plans included the notion that your income after inflation and health care might be going up instead of down, well that’s just too bad…
I have never understood what is so hard about not accumulating consumer debt (student loans and medical debts are obviously different, because those are more or less required costs and aren’t influenced in any meaningful way by financial self-discipline). Do people just…want more things, want them badly enough to override their financial sense (and is that a case of their discipline being weak, rather than their desire being strong)?
It’s very easy to get into consumer debt without buying the newest and the shiniest “stuff”. Things that ended up on my credit cards over the years:
— the new clutch for my six year old car ($1300)
— the new roof for the house we were trying to sell (which we hoped to pay off after the sale, but prices dropped so much we barely broke even–$3000)
— four months of mortgage payments on the old house beyond the five we had saved for ($1200)
— living expenses off and on during the three years I was laid off four times and my husband was laid off twice
We have never had an “extravagant” lifestyle: our main luxury items are new computers and cell phones, which we both have to have in our different industries (especially when we’re contracting)–and even then, we build our own, cannibalize parts, use refurbs where possible, etc. Our TV is ten years old. Both our cars are over 5 years old and paid off. We both wear clothes pretty much until they fall off our bodies. Our daughter’s wardrobe is over 50% hand-me-downs. Non-necessary upgrades to our lifestyle and our house (the PS3, replacing the carpet, etc.) come out of my non-budgeted annual bonus only and are rarely allowed to be more than 60% of it.
Most of our credit card debt was incurred 10-15 years ago (when my husband went back to school) and 5-7 years ago (during that “6 layoffs between us” period). And when we finally did get into long-term jobs, both our salaries went down by at least 25%.
We take years to get caught up, but we can’t get far enough ahead to stave off one layoff or one crisis. That’s the biggest issue for most people, I think: not having three months salary (minimum) on hand to deal with emergencies. And I think part of the reason for that is the whole “pay off your debts before you start saving” mentality–which financially the exact wrong advice.
I think that the shame aspect of debt is important to explore. So much relies upon one’s credit score nowadays; having lousy credit means constantly dancing around the subject of your credit worthiness so that nobody thinks you’re a dirtbag. Once your credit is sufficiently crappy, it’s very possible to dig yourself into a hole you can’t possibly dig out of–if you can’t get a better job, or finance a car to get to work, or get a bank account, or find a place to live that doesn’t run your credit, then you’re going to have a hard damn time getting ahead.
At least with credit card debt, there’s hope. You can declare bankruptcy or just wait out the statute of limitations. Me, I’m saddled with student loan debt, and having to retroactively finance an education that didn’t do a damn thing to improve my job prospects is pretty embittering. I’ve defaulted on my student loans before and I have no doubt it’s cost me jobs; in fact, it keeps me TERRIFIED of losing the one I have, because I don’t know what I’d do.
Not to mention that my healthcare is all tied up in my job, too. That’s the new America–people are so afraid to step out of line that they’ll put up with anything if it keeps them afloat.
if this posts twice, sorry:
I think that the shame aspect of debt is important to explore. So much relies upon one’s credit score nowadays; having lousy credit means constantly dancing around the subject of your credit worthiness so that nobody thinks you’re a dirtbag. Once your credit is sufficiently crappy, it’s very possible to dig yourself into a hole you can’t possibly dig out of–if you can’t get a better job, or finance a car to get to work, or get a bank account, or find a place to live that doesn’t run your credit, then you’re going to have a hard damn time getting ahead.
At least with credit card debt, there’s hope. You can declare bankruptcy or just wait out the statute of limitations. Me, I’m saddled with student loan debt, and having to retroactively finance an education that didn’t do a damn thing to improve my job prospects is pretty embittering. I’ve defaulted on my student loans before and I have no doubt it’s cost me jobs; in fact, it keeps me TERRIFIED of losing the one I have, because I don’t know what I’d do.
Not to mention that my healthcare is all tied up in my job, too. That’s the new America–people are so afraid to step out of line that they’ll put up with anything if it keeps them afloat.
I think that the shame aspect of debt is important to explore. So much relies upon one’s credit score nowadays; having lousy credit means constantly dancing around the subject of your credit worthiness so that nobody thinks you’re a dirtbag. Once your credit is sufficiently crappy, it’s very possible to dig yourself into a hole you can’t possibly dig out of–if you can’t get a better job, or finance a car to get to work, or get a bank account, or find a place to live that doesn’t run your credit, then you’re going to have a hard damn time getting ahead.
At least with credit card debt, there’s hope. You can declare bankruptcy or just wait out the statute of limitations. Me, I’m saddled with student loan debt, and having to retroactively finance an education that didn’t do a damn thing to improve my job prospects is pretty embittering. I’ve defaulted on my student loans before and I have no doubt it’s cost me jobs; in fact, it keeps me TERRIFIED of losing the one I have, because I don’t know what I’d do.
Not to mention that my healthcare is all tied up in my job, too. That’s the new America–people are so afraid to step out of line that they’ll put up with anything if it keeps them afloat.
Sometimes it’s just the cost of living that drives up my credit cards. The car breaks down and I need my car to get to work. The refrigerator dies. Emergency vet bills. Unexpected expenses that I try to cover with savings/cash and find that I’ve left myself unable to pay for even a small amount of groceries to tide me over. Presciptions or medical co-pays. With chidren, I would imagine that the unexpected or emergency situations would add up fast.
I stretched myself far and used most of my savings to pay off all my credit cards and medical bills, and I now face this economy with very little in savings. If an appliance goes down or the car breaks down, I’m screwed and back into credit card debt again.
I sure wish it were just the desire for an iPhone or a new wardrobe that was driving me into the poorhouse. That problem would be easy to solve.
I think that the shame aspect of debt is important to explore. So much relies upon one’s credit score nowadays; having lousy credit means constantly dancing around the subject of your credit worthiness so that nobody thinks you’re a dirtbag. Once your credit is sufficiently crappy, it’s very possible to dig yourself into a hole you can’t possibly dig out of–if you can’t get a better job, or finance a car to get to work, or get a bank account, or find a place to live that doesn’t run your credit, then you’re going to have a hard damn time getting ahead.
At least with credit card debt, there’s hope. You can declare bankruptcy or just wait out the statute of limitations. Me, I’m saddled with student loan debt, and having to retroactively finance an education that didn’t do a damn thing to improve my job prospects is pretty embittering. I’ve defaulted on my student loans before and I have no doubt it’s cost me jobs; in fact, it keeps me TERRIFIED of losing the one I have, because I don’t know what I’d do.
Not to mention that my healthcare is all tied up in my job, too. That’s the new America–people are so afraid to step out of line that they’ll put up with anything if it keeps them afloat.
I think that the shame aspect of debt is important to explore. So much relies upon one’s credit score nowadays; having lousy credit means constantly dancing around the subject of your credit worthiness so that nobody thinks you’re a dirtbag. Once your credit is sufficiently crappy, it’s very possible to dig yourself into a hole you can’t possibly dig out of–if you can’t get a better job, or finance a car to get to work, or get a bank account, or find a place to live that doesn’t run your credit, then you’re going to have a hard damn time getting ahead.
At least with credit card debt, there’s hope. You can declare bankruptcy or just wait out the statute of limitations. Me, I’m saddled with student loan debt, and having to retroactively finance an education that didn’t do a damn thing to improve my job prospects is pretty embittering. I’ve defaulted on my student loans before and I have no doubt it’s cost me jobs; in fact, it keeps me TERRIFIED of losing the one I have, because I don’t know what I’d do.
Not to mention that my healthcare is all tied up in my job, too. That’s the new America–people are so afraid to step out of line that they’ll put up with anything if it keeps them afloat.
I think that the shame aspect of debt is important to explore. So much relies upon one’s credit score nowadays; having lousy credit means constantly dancing around the subject of your credit worthiness so that nobody thinks you’re a dirtbag. Once your credit is sufficiently crappy, it’s very possible to dig yourself into a hole you can’t possibly dig out of–if you can’t get a better job, or finance a car to get to work, or get a bank account, or find a place to live that doesn’t run your credit, then you’re going to have a hard damn time getting ahead.
At least with credit card debt, there’s hope. You can declare bankruptcy or just wait out the statute of limitations. Me, I’m saddled with student loan debt, and having to retroactively finance an education that didn’t do a damn thing to improve my job prospects is pretty embittering. I’ve defaulted on my student loans before and I have no doubt it’s cost me jobs; in fact, it keeps me TERRIFIED of losing the one I have, because I don’t know what I’d do.
Not to mention that my healthcare is all tied up in my job, too. That’s the new America–people are so afraid to step out of line that they’ll put up with anything if it keeps them afloat.
The thing that kills me are the credit card companies who deem customers who pay off their balance in full each month to be deadbeats and bad credit risks.
I remember when I paid off a car loan early. I couldn’t believe how pissed the people at Ford Motor Credit were that they didn’t get the maximum interest on the loan.
Those make my head explode every time.
I’m not especially interested in blaming people for having low willpower in the face of extremely intense, non-stop consumerist pressure, Rebecca. Obviously, it’s important to moderate yourself, but no one is perfect.
“I’m not especially interested in blaming people for having low willpower in the face of extremely intense, non-stop consumerist pressure, Rebecca.”
Economic Slut-Shaming…
Time for a plug. I am recovering from a major debt, about $20k. I have been going to meetings of debtors anonymous, which has really helped find a way to get out of debt, but more importantly get sane about money and credit.
If you have a problem with debt instead of living in shame there is a better way. Its sounds absurd, but please check out the website, read the 12 signs, try a meeting.
As Betsy pointed out, modern Western economies are based on growth. You know what you call constant growth in a biological system? You call it cancer.
I personally think having an entire economic system absolutely predicated on constant expansion is about as harmful.
I don’t have credit cards — every time I do, I dig myself into a hole, and that’s with very tiny credit limits (seriously, like $500). Fortunately, I have a small trust fund to fall back on in case of emergency, like the $4K in vet bills that we racked up by having two cats become terminally ill and die in two years.
I was thinking about maybe getting a credit card and was reading the literature for the one from my longtime bank. Sure enough, there was a provision in there that if you had even one late payment, they could jack your interest rate from 9.95% to 35%.
No thank you. I’ll keep paying cash.
Why is it apparantly so hard to tell yourself, “No, I can’t afford that”?
Well, for one thing, the constant pressure of advertising telling you you need it. It’s more powerful than you think. So is the mentality of: “Buy it now, worry about paying for it later”… that kind of mentality is way more encouraged than it should be, because as several people have said, it drives growth. I’ve fallen prey to it on more than one occasion myself.
But apart from that, if the thing you can’t afford is groceries, or the utility bill, or car repairs that are necessary if you want to get to work, or a new fridge or oven because yours crapped out, or a presentable outfit for a job interview, or clothes (even second hand clothes) for your growing children… well, “I can’t afford that” isn’t really an option. So you put it on your credit card and hope for it to sort itself out.
You know what you call constant growth in a biological system? You call it cancer.
“Perpetual growth: the creed of the cancer cell.”
— Edward Abbey
I know he has a religious tilt, but I really would recommend Dave Ramsey to anyone you know dealing with credit card debt or just anyone entering the real world. My brother just graduated from college and I made sure he had a copy so that he will learn to budget, stay away from credit cards, etc. and the stories of people who have scraped their way out of consumer debt is inspiring.
I hate the credit card industry and do not own a card, but we really do need to think of a way for people that need money in the short term to have it available. If there were no credit cards for people with poor credit ratings or payday loans, then how would they buy that new transmission, or pay for groceries until the next check gets there. The easy answer is to say we will still let them operate but they have to charge reasonable interest rates, etc. I suspect that if we made them do that they would not be lucrative enough to be self-sustaining and would simply disappear, or at least be much less available, so then we would be left with the same problem, how do people take care of those short term needs.
I am studying to get my Ph.D. in Public Policy and would genuinely appreciate ideas about this, if we didn’t let credit card companies charge high rates to justify lending to people with bad credit ratings, and those people still had emergency expenses for transmissions, groceries, etc., what type of alternative system could we realistically create in this capitalist society that would meet those needs.
I know he has a religious tilt, but I really would recommend Dave Ramsey to anyone you know dealing with credit card debt or just anyone entering the real world. My brother just graduated from college and I made sure he had a copy so that he will learn to budget, stay away from credit cards, etc. and the stories of people who have scraped their way out of consumer debt is inspiring.
I hate the credit card industry and do not own a card, but we really do need to think of a way for people that need money in the short term to have it available. If there were no credit cards for people with poor credit ratings or payday loans, then how would they buy that new transmission, or pay for groceries until the next check gets there. The easy answer is to say we will still let them operate but they have to charge reasonable interest rates, etc. I suspect that if we made them do that they would not be lucrative enough to be self-sustaining and would simply disappear, or at least be much less available, so then we would be left with the same problem, how do people take care of those short term needs.
I am studying to get my Ph.D. in Public Policy and would genuinely appreciate ideas about this, if we didn’t let credit card companies charge high rates to justify lending to people with bad credit ratings, and those people still had emergency expenses for transmissions, groceries, etc., what type of alternative system could we realistically create in this capitalist society that would meet those needs.
Having recently graduated college, I’m grateful that I didn’t incur much debt at all - scholarships and a small loan. Also went to a state university, so the tuition was lower.
What gets to me is how active the credit card companies are in pushing high interest cards on students who are living in the red or nearly borderline. The companies hope that students have their parents to leech off of the card gets maxed out and the debts go out of control. Company representatives actively seek students out on campus; it’s not just junk mail. They’re a bloodthirsty industry.
The article literally hit home for me. My parents have dug themselves into a hole with credit cards and continue to inject the debts (in the 5 figures) into the house mortgage to live beyond their means. What bothers me most is that they’ll never pay off their debts in their lifetime—they’re already up to their eyeballs in debt. They didn’t get there through hospital bills or chronic disease. Just like the woman, they are are addicted to buying. I feel sympathy for her as it takes a lifetime or longer to reverse such situations.
Me, I’m saddled with student loan debt, and having to retroactively finance an education that didn’t do a damn thing to improve my job prospects is pretty embittering. I’ve defaulted on my student loans before and I have no doubt it’s cost me jobs; in fact, it keeps me TERRIFIED of losing the one I have, because I don’t know what I’d do.
Well, what I did in the last non-recession like this one was start a business.
Now I own two houses, paid off what was dogging me (student loans) for a cash settlement, and told the credit card bankers to bite me. While I still get the occasional contact from a collector whose employer bought the accounts that fell off my credit report years ago, but now it’s an opportunity to help out that hapless person. “You know, there are good jobs out there collecting from people who still need to pay to fix their lives, so you should go get one instead of letting them dump crappy leads like me on your desk. This debt aged off 40 months ago and your employer is hoping I’m a sucker instead of bidding on current overdue accounts…because those accounts would cost them money. Good luck!”
All it took was sheer desperation, and the ability to do 11th grade math, to make 10 years of not answering the phone seem like an easy way out. But the secret is, there was no other way. If you lose your job, getting another one may be impossible, as it was for me.
Go to your library and take out the updated, revised What color is your parachute?, because once your student debt goes bad, your options for complying your way back onto the main drag of our society are sharply limited. I only wish I had figured it out sooner and spent less of my 20s trying to do the impossible.
(/unwanted free advice)
Except, Robert, that some commenters did in fact resort straight to female-specific slanders. It was just overwhelmed, for once, by sympathy. I’m actually quite right that there’s something about women’s debasement that makes it harder for some people to dig in their hearts and find sympathy. I didn’t say it was impossible or that all people were afflicted. Just a lot, and they tend to congregate in the comments at Salon.
If you actually read the comments section at Salon on a regular basis, you’d see what I mean. I spoke with a man who works there once and he said that the comments section at Broadsheet really opened up his eyes to the amount of misogyny out there. It’s appalling.
@ Mickle: Rather than tell you to “fuck off” yourself, I’ll just say that you should take some advice I’ve received on other threads here: It’s not about you. If you incurred your debt through auto repairs, or student loans, or medical bills, or other necessary expenses (such as the expenses you and dorvl have listed), then you aren’t the debtor we’re talking about. So chill out.
We’re talking about people who, as in the linked Salon article, don’t know how to “sacrifice immediate gratification for future stability.” People whose debt comes not from illness or unemployment but from drinking $3 coffee and $15 CDs and $80 bar tabs. So if that doesn’t describe you and your debt, then you have no reason to take it personally.
Certainly the US economy relies on overspending to grow, but that’s not why individuals get into consumer debt, and it’s not appropriate to let individuals point the figure at society when they suddenly realize they’re in over their heads.
Pick a side. There is no ‘but’.
One perspective is that our economy is ‘growing’ on spending made possible by debt, in the absence of wage growth. The gap between rising prices and steady wages, in constant dollars, has to be met somehow, and that somehow is personal debt.
The other is that credit card and home equity personal debts are personal choices. Cut back on the lattes, fool, and your wages will cover your living expenses!
I wish the second explanation were accurate, because then the shakeout from the Big Shitpile would be easy and only the undeserving would be paying the price for our 30 year binge on the Chinese.
Sadly, the first conforms more closely with reality. We’re all going on the slide down together, and it’s important that the 99% of Americans who have not benefitted from the Second Gilded Age quit blamestorming and grasp that we’ve been screwed.
People whose debt comes not from illness or unemployment but from drinking $3 coffee and $15 CDs and $80 bar tabs. So if that doesn’t describe you and your debt, then you have no reason to take it personally.
MH wants you to know that your abortion was for the right reasons, the ones that are okay, so all the shaming about those bad girls? It’s not about you.
More seriously: In 1978, LPs cost $4 and my dad made $10 an hour. Today CDs cost $9 used and if I had stayed in my dad’s business, I would make $12 an hour. More to the point, gas was 79 cents a gallon and is now 4 times that. Price inflation, wages lagging…should the people who want to stay pure quit their jobs instead of using credit cards to keep the car running and full of gas?
This has been interesting and helpful to the work I have to accomplish over the coming 48 hours to stop my state from criminalizing and making homeless a number of victims of the personal debt scam. You all have really given me a view into the mindset of those who believe that household debt is about personal choices. Thanks, Pandagon Brain Trust!
Hey MH, I don’t have any credit card debt — so it’s “not about me” but you are still being heartless and people are right to call you on it.
Let’s say that some people are more vulnerable to being sucked under by silly purchases. What’s your plan for them? Turn ‘em into soup?
If your answer involves “choice”, and people being “free to choose” and making “bad choices” — in an economy PREDICATED ON PEOPLE MAKING THOSE “BAD CHOICES” — then you are being both heartless *and* clueless.
It doesn’t have to be “about me” for me to notice.
As to why I don’t have debt — I’m not a maker of awesome choices who deserves prizes. I’m lucky. My parents paid for my education and helped me out throughout my 20s afterward, finally I landed a decent job at age *33*, and I haven’t had any health or other catastrophes during those years. That’s it. Remove any of those elements and I have no doubt I’d be effed. That’s how the economy works.
If that’s supposed to be me, then you’ve got a ridiculous strawman under construction. I plainly never said and never implied that debt is all about personal choices. No one has, yet, in this thread. What I am saying is that SOME debt is the cause of poor personal spending habits. Do you seriously disagree with that?
I’d love to condemn this woman, but the truth is that I got myself in a fair amount of CC debt to tide me over during a dry funding period in grad school.
Yes, now that’s all paid off, and I have a savings account, a couple of retirement accounts, and a student loan payment, but things could have completely gone in the other direction. If I made half the salary I do now and had gone unemployed for several months, I could easily find myself in this woman’s position.
There should be no reason the bankruptcy laws needed to be changed. CC companies loaned her uncollatoralized money at high rates. She should have been able to simply declare bankruptcy and move on, and the banks would have simply written off the loan as a non-performing asset. I’ve lost money on investments. No reason they can’t, too.
I have no problem with the moral hectoring of those who live beyond their means. Credit card debt is not “normal.” There’s no reason to carry a balance on something this month that you can save up for a few months from now; blah, blah, blah. But for those like this woman who are at the breaking point, there’s no reason we should feel the slightest tinge of moral condemnation for expecting her to simply declare bankruptcy and move on. The problem is that our government, in its moral self-righteous rectitude, decided to make this more difficult.
MH, here’s some other advice you often hear around these parts: if you don’t understand, then shut up and listen.
Another plug - Consumer Credit Counseling Services. Saved my rear end when I was in my early 20s. They negotiated lower interest rates with the credit card companies and helped me make my payments, figure out a financial plan I could live with and move on. Make sure that you get one of the nonprofits, though. The credit card companies donate to the CCCSs because it saves them money on collections.
I paid back every damn dime. I’m very proud of that.
Where do you get the idea that I’m being heartless? Where have I ever said even one word about what fate should befall people who buy their way into debt? If you’re having trouble answering that, here’s a hint: NOWHERE, because I didn’t. What I was interested in discussing, but I guess I won’t get to because no one else seems likewise interested, were the underlying reasons why some people are more vulnerable to being sucked under by silly purchases” than others.
In fact, what I think should happen is that they should receive (free) financial advice to curb those bad habits and take control of their finances. (The blog Get Rich Slowly has a lot of good advice on this, FYI.) I don’t give one shit about shaming people for their past choices, or punishing them further for it. I am interested in HELPING those people avoid making similar poor choices in the future, both by encouraging them to make more responsible decisions and by reducing the societal pressures to consume more and more.
But no, you’re more interested in falsely painting me as some kind of “throw ‘em to the wolves” libertard. Real helpful.
What I am saying is that SOME debt is the cause of poor personal spending habits. Do you seriously disagree with that?
We’re pointing out that not only do credit card companies encourage that kind of debt, our economy is based on the assumption that consumers will live beyond their means and buy consumer goods they can’t really afford, like iPods and big-screen TVs. If everyone stopped running up their credit cards and only bought things that they saved up for, the economy would grind to a halt.
In fact, it’s already happening. This Christmas season was one of the worst on record for retailers, because people looked at their budgets and decided they couldn’t spend very much.
MH,
Why is it apparantly so hard to tell yourself, “No, I can’t afford that”?
Can someone explain that to me?
You asked people to explain, and they have. The “explanation” in many cases is “I didn’t have much choice” or “I could afford it before my industry completely tanked and 100,000 people lost their jobs at the same time.”
Yes, some people have spending problems. Yes, some people don’t know how to budget. Yes, some people shop obsessively as a result of some psychiatric disorders. The problem is that by focusing on these people as the public face of the debt crisis, you help create the strawman argument that “all debtors are just deadbeats who deserve to get punished.”
You say that you did not make that argument yourself: but, honestly, that’s usually the argument that gets made by people who focus on the same points you do. Much like, “I know not all rape victims were asking for it, but didn’t she choose to wear a skimpy outfit to a bar?” comments, it just furthers the cause of people who do want to argue that strawman and dismiss an issue of unregulated predatory lending as “bad personal choices”.
That just ensures that nothing gets changed, and the banks continue on their merry way.
“Turn ‘em into soup?”
Why not? Everyone knows Soup Is Good Food…
With regards to the story itself, I should note that it was interesting how at the end she confessed to having a large, expensive apartment. No one compliments someone on how large their apartment in New York City is unless it’s large. And that means it was very expensive.
For those of us, including the author, who are in our 30s, this is sort of a big deal: the idea of living with roommates at this stage in our lives is hard to deal with, but at the same time, the amount of additional rent it costs to live alone takes many thousands of dollars per year out of our pockets. That’s bad enough… but to rent a self-consciously large apartment which is obviously costing her a lot of money, that’s just bad judgment.
You can have a great job, a great apartment, or a great lifestyle, but you can only choose 2 out of 3.
Well, ok. Those are understandable, empathiz-able reasons.
Ok, well, if that’s what I’m doing, it’s unintended and I apologize for that. I certainly don’t think all debtors are deadbeats. Several of my friends are in some level of debt, and I know I would likely also be if not for certain good fortune that I’ve had.
Which is what helped me realize that debt is a problem, and I would like to see it eliminated.
Which is why I think usurious credit card rates are a problem - because they keep debt hanging around.
Which is why I advocate for stronger personal financial decision-making prowess, some fractional part of which (not all) is based on personal discipline.
Which is why I am (thought I had been) careful not to use words like “deadbeat” when describing debtors.
I can see your point about not furthering the cause of those who do want to argue things I disagree with. I’m not convinced that ignoring that facet of debt entirely is a sound strategy, however. Take the person in the article that began this post: while it IS the credit card company’s fault that she remains in debt for so long (because of huge interest rates designed to effect exactly that outcome), it’s not really their fault she fell into debt in the first place. The CC-companies lay these debt-traps all around (colleges, as noted upthread) and lure or wait for people to fall into them, and I happen to think it would be more productive in the short run to teach people not to fall in, rather than trying to disarm those traps.
It would be fair to characterize my position as treating the symptoms rather than the disease, but I think that’s okay because sometimes the underlying problem is so much more difficult to treat that while you’re focusing on the disease, the symptoms might kill you. I believe that debt is just such a situation.
If that’s supposed to be me, then you’ve got a ridiculous strawman under construction. I plainly never said and never implied that debt is all about personal choices.
No, you’re not so helpful, because you’re thinking it through rather than simply parroting what you know that ain’t so. The capacity for reflection is not a noted one among my particular state’s solons. YMMV.
It’s the person who says out of one side ‘Dave Ramsay the debtor-blaming Xian AM-radio-version-of-Suze-Orman can help you solve your problems’ out of one side and ‘I’m a PhD student in public policy who can’t find the center of this issue with both hands and a flashlight’ out of the other who is really acting as a catalyst for improved understanding on my part.
And the banking industry, which hated the reform bill as much as the progressives but for different reasons, killed the bill I was analyzing earlier. Strange bedfellows indeed.
This sort of thing is why I don’t have any credit cards. I know I would abuse them without mercy. My mother…I shudder to think about her, but guess where I learned my spending from. The only thing moderating me is that I know I have a limit on how much I can spend. If I had a credit card, even if I put it in the freezer…yeah, I’d memorize the numbers and buy crap off the Internet, just because I COULD.
Problem being…in this society, you HAVE to have credit, at least for big purchases and emergencies and such. When my apartment flooded years ago, I stayed at my friend’s house, but my credit-abusing roommate got a hotel room for 2 months. Sure, the complex would pay you back (eventually…) for doing so, but that night and for most nights, that was coming out of her pocket ASAP. If I hadn’t had my friend with crash space, I would have been screwed.
So, I know I should get one. But…I can’t deal with having one. What the fuck do I do?
In 2003, I had around $21,000 in credit card debt. Among the reasons:
- a $300 emergency vet bill for my cat
- a $650 mouth guard to keep me from grinding my teeth, not covered by dental insurance
- part of the downpayment on my new used car after an accident where I totalled my existing car
- repairs to the replacement car a year later when it was out of warranty
- groceries and gas after I got laid off in 2001
- interest charges that were up to 30% because I’d gotten off-schedule on payments when MBNA changed my due date without telling me
- two new computers over six years–I’m a tech worker, so having a functional computer is kind of essential
- a fair amount of stuff I probably shouldn’t have spent money on
It gets worse, though. By 2003, I was making payments, but I was concerned about the interest, so I decided to try to do something about it. I enrolled in a debt management program. Shortly after I did that, the original company sold out to an outfit called Family Credit Counseling Corporation. They’ve since been hit with a class-action suit, because they suck long and hard. I called them a couple of times, because the amount on my statements wasn’t going down like I thought it should be. They assured me that it would all balance out in the end, as long as I kept making payments. So I did.
Last year, I should have completed the program, but BofA was insisting that I still owed them $16,000. After filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, FCCC finally returned my calls, and told me that I had been enrolled in a credit insurance plan that was adding charges to my account even though the account was supposed to be closed.
I’ve been trying to deal directly with BofA since August. Every time I call I get a different person. I have to start from the beginning, and they inevitably tell me that they can’t find the records because it all dates back to 2003, and someone will definitely call me back with an answer.
FCCC eventually did send me a complete record of all my payments. Those payments, combined with the “good faith” payments I’ve made to BofA for the past six months, total over $25,000. BofA still claims I owe them $15,000.
Now, you can argue that it’s all my fault, and certainly, I spent money I didn’t have, so the responsibility for that is on me. But when I tried to take the initiative to deal with the problem, I was repeatedly misinformed, stonewalled, and outright lied to by both the people who were allegedly helping me and the creditors. In the end, BofA has zero incentive to resolve this issue, because what they want is to keep taking my money. The system is designed to ensure that once you get into debt–which is difficult not to do at some point–you never get out.
This is one of the big reasons I have trouble taking the $600 checks from the government seriously. It seems likely nearly everyone in America at this point either doesn’t need $600, or needs $600 every two months just to keep up with their credit card debt…
Phoenix Rising,
Aside from name-calling I would like to have a real discussion. Let’s say that 100% of the entire problem lies with sleazy credit card companies and payday lenders and 0% with any individual in the world. You still have to deal with the fact that people with bad credit need cash for emergencies, they are not going to get it from reputable lenders, and the only reason sleazy lenders give it to them is because they can rob them blind. So in this reality, if you take away the ability to rob them blind, how do people with bad credit get money to buy groceries or fix their transmission, or any of the other emergencies that have been discussed? I am not being rhetorical, I want a real policy proposal. I assumed that someone on this site would have a good idea, like a short-term government loan agency or something, anything. The micro-credit concept is great for starting businesses, but as a consumer spending loan it still charges 50% interest rates. If you were Obama’s or Hillary’s advisor how would you tell them to address it?
Again, you’re missing the point. Our entire economy is based on people going into massive debt, whether it’s credit card debt or refinancing their house. If people decide to not to that anymore, you know what we get? We get last quarter’s results (see my link at #47) and recession (at best) if not actual depression.
We’ve been living in a house of cards, and individual indebtedness is going to seem like child’s play once the tsunami of foreclosures sweeps over American banks.
And this guy nails it, though the weird sexual metaphor is off-putting and unnecessary.
I dunno - when it comes to the politics of opening countries up to international capital, the icky sexual metaphors seem quite appropriate.
I strongly recommend this book on the topic.
Why are you all piling onto MH? She’s not heartless - she’s simply saying that in general maintaining good financial habits and delaying gratification isn’t that hard - and it isn’t that hard. The problem is that it has become the cultural norm for most people like the woman in the article to live in debt and not within or below their means simply for the sake of lifestyle inflation. That mindset needs challenging.
I happen to think the credit card industry is an absolute beast; a nest of evil, grasping, sneaky little fucks. I also think that rather than waiting for the Corpocracy to regulate it into a gentler, fairer creature (dream on) we need to empower people to manage their money to the absolute best of their abilities - something which sadly far too many people in the best of circumstances still do not - thereby evading a royal arsefucking at the hands of predatory loan companies. It’s in our own interest to see through the ads and the idea of buying our way to happiness through the accumulaton of endless clutter we don’t need.
It’s not victim-blaming to suggest eschewing what have become common poor financial habits and attitudes in favour of better ones. It’s not victim-blaming to ask people to look at their lifestyle and ask themselves if they think they are really sustainable. If you do fall on bad times, having sound budgeting skills and some savings accrued from living within your means will serve you far better than already being in a mess of debt.
I’ve been trying to deal directly with BofA since August. Every time I call I get a different person. I have to start from the beginning, and they inevitably tell me that they can’t find the records because it all dates back to 2003, and someone will definitely call me back with an answer.
Ugh. The worst BoA story I ever heard was a guy who deposited a check for $2,000 in his account using an ATM, but somehow the computer got confused and booked it as a $2,000 withdrawal. From an ATM. And every time he would call BofA to point out to them that their very own ATMs say you can’t withdraw that amount, they said, “But the computer says you did, so you must have!”
He finally got it straightened out, but it took three months of calling and screaming at them every single day.
BofA = evil incarnate.
My heating bill on my tiny rented house is over $300/month during the winter. I do not have a credit card -have not had one since I had to declare bankruptcy to extricate myself from the debt my ex foisted on me in the course of our failed marriage and divorce. And yet I still struggle, with a middling sort of salaried job (thankfully with health insurance), to keep my head above water - just to pay for the necessities for myself and my two kids. Which means this year my part of college tuition not covered by grants and loans… next year two sets of such expenses (awk!!). I shop at the thrift store when my clothes are in tatters and even then feel guilty dropping $50 on a couple of outfits. I’m always late on my car payments. If I had a credit card, even though I would surely have the usurious rate, I’m sure I would succumb to the impulse to put food and utilities on it hoping for that next freelance gig (my second job) before the month was up. I can tell you all about the shame and guilt I feel for being late or being in debt at all, and the indignities I have had to suffer because of my poor credit over the years. And about the antibiotics I take periodically to calm infections from the dental work I have neglected because I simply cannot afford it. I’m not looking for pity - I’m just saying that living is expensive and credit is still pretty easy to get if you want to suck up the rates. I’d be willing to bet that the “ipod - big screen tv- uncontrolled spending” debtor is our generation’s version of the welfare queen.
I got a credit card when I was 20 because I checked my credit score and it was low. There was a recommendation that I get a card and build up my credit or else my boyfriend and I wouldn’t have qualified for an apartment (two years later).
So I got my credit card and I used it. My credit card debt isn’t bad but it’s still there and it often feels like I’m not getting anywhere on it. I am trying a new strategy now where everything goes on my credit card and then I pay a HUGE amount towards the card every Friday when my check comes in. It appears to be working albeit slowly.
Besides the credit card I have over 30k in school loans, about 1k left on my car, 2k for furniture we bought two years ago and am looking to purchase a house of my own. It’s… just the life of being an American. You can’t escape it.
Robin Rhea — your question is a reasonable one, but in a different way than you suppose. It’s like saying, “what’s the policy proposal for figuring out what to do once you are slathered in peanut butter and surrounded by angry bears?”
“cover yourself in more peanut butter so the angry bears have to dig through it and thereby buy yourself some time to think!” seems like, well, better than nothing for sure. I’d go for it if I was Miss Peanut Butter Slatheree. But it wouldn’t strike me as pure genius.
You are asking the question at the point where some kind of huge fuckup has already happened (desperate poor person, bad credit, etc.). I think people here are more interested in figuring out ways that prevent such a fuckup from happening over and over again.
to go back to the “personal responsibility” thing. I think it is possible that some people are less “personally responsible” about money or whatever than are others. If that is in fact the case, it doesn’t seem to me that the way to deal with it is to punish them with lifelong anxiety and near-poverty. What if they don’t learn a lesson from it? What if they just end up having a super crap life? What kind of monster ADVOCATES that kind of viciousness?
Kathleen,
I agree it has already happened, and yes I think rules that prevent it from happening should be welcome, so end any type of lending deemed predatory and offer some type of education courses so that people will borrow responsibly and not get bad credit ratings. However, even if you do both of those things you are still left with a huge population of people that needs money to pay for life expenses and cannot get it from reputable lenders. Has there really been nothing proposed at NOW conferences or by groups designed at empowering people that would be a practical policy proposal to deal with this situation?
I was talking about yesterday at work–I work in an airport, and was talking with AIRLINE PILOTS– a solid, middle-class profession — and our new pilot was talking about how he had to duck creditors and such because of his outlandish student loans. It’s not a gender problem–it’s all over the place.
Robin Rhea — your question is a reasonable one, but in a different way than you suppose. It’s like saying, “what’s the policy proposal for figuring out what to do once you are slathered in peanut butter and surrounded by angry bears?”
There is a lot of material out there on this issue, Robin, so what makes it a scary question is that you seem sincere to me.
Keep studying and I feel certain that someone in your PhD program will tell you what to Google. Meanwhile, here’s a flashlight: This problem is actually a relatively new one. It’s not like other persistent issues in development, because the use of credit as an instrument available to people without a financial net is itself a policy response to discrimination in lending. Some of the groups that work on this issue are the low-income and women’s lending/consulting programs funded partially by the SBA, welfare reform coalitions, and ACORN.
The policy analysis work I do is complex. Reaching my current level of competence has taken years of work and I’m not even that good at it yet–there’s a guy in the office where I work who’s been at it for 25 years and it shows. Beyond that, I have an aptitude for this sort of thing. Obviously Amanda’s bandwidth is not the place for me to transmit that knowledge to you, should you also have an aptitude for grasping it.
I remember an interview with Carl Hiaasen a few years ago when he lamented that Florida’s only industry was growth, and that of course such growth wasn’t sustainable in the long term. I thought at the time that it sounded an awful lot like the Dallas area, and it turns out that it sounds an awful lot like America in general. I’d blame it on GWB, but this problem is way older than him.
Kinda makes me want to spend my last dime on a bunker and a truckload of canned goods, though…
There are at least two aspects to the problem - one is the difficulty people have living within their means whether due to need or bombardment with messages to buy or both; another is the way credit card companies seem to have done close study of people’s weaknesses in terms of disorganization or being busy etc, and exploiting them to the max for their profit. By that I mean sneaky tactics like changing grace periods, making solicitations look like bills you have to pay, luring people into taking unneeded services “for free” (but only for 3 months) realizing that people will forget about cancelling; that kind of crap. I feel like they have deliberately made their bills and communications opaque and misleading, knowing that a large fraction of people get frustrated easily and leave things for “later”… only to forget them in the midst of long days and commutes and fatigue. These companies make most of their profit on late fees - which makes me especially mad. It seems like these companies are using practices that once were considered unethical - well I still think they are.
I am someone who almost always pays on time in full. I have one card I love - had it for years, from my old credit union. There have been a handful of times I know my payment got there a day late, and they have never charged me a late fee. I have another card I hate but keep partly to have a backup card, partly to spite the bastards by keeping it open and not using it. Once they snared me by moving the due date back by a week, I didn’t notice and got slapped wtih a $50 late fee. Didn’t use it for more than a year. Then, they sent me a promotion, saying they would give me $20 for free if I used the card - which I did, for a donation to some organization. Then I watched my mail carefully… sure enough, when the bill came I had to mail it back with payment THAT DAY or it would have been late. The bastards were seriously trying to trick me into another $50 late fee, by teasing me with the $20! But I ran that payment straight to the post office. Man I hate these companies.
So yeah I know it is even worse if you are in trouble financially, but even if you aren’t they are bad.
Has there really been nothing proposed at NOW conferences or by groups designed at empowering people that would be a practical policy proposal to deal with this situation?
How much economic policy does NOW even get involved in?
um, I’m starting to get a bit suspicious — this is like, “ohmigod look at the poor women of country X! Why hasn’t NOW taken care of THAT?!?!”
I have no idea what NOW’s policy position on consumer indebtedness is. But it’s pretty weird to me that someone would bring it up as the *one* named example of an organization that ought to solve this huge problem that it didn’t create. I think we might be falling victim to a troll: “NOW: not devoting enough effort to saving women from angry bears since 1971! And yet daring to call itself feminist all the while!”
Hey, now, don’t be downplaying the dire threat of bears to our everyday lives!
“I believe all God’s creatures have a soul — except bears.”
I think our entire economy is flawed. You guys should watch this:
www.storyofstuff.com
It explains that our economy that’s based on consumption is inherantly unsustainable, and that leads to inequities. And I’m linking this tenuously to the topic ay saying that if we wern’t all (And I mean all of us) driven to consume, credit card debtors would have been able to cheat us out of our money.
Of course by ay I meant by, and when I said “would” I meant “wouldn’t”.
Sorry, I couldn’t quite think of what other groups would be interested in this issue. No, I do not think NOW is responsible, but I was trying to think of groups generally interested in disenfranchised groups that might care about this, I could have easily said NAACP without thinking but since this is a feminist site NOW came out. Now that Phoenix mentions ACORN that seems much more logical.
Mnemosyne — that’s awesome. I’d never seen “Wikiality” before!
Robin Rhea — fair enough. but just, I think maybe it’s not all that fair to ask NOW or the NAACP to be the ones to spearhead the fight against consumer indebtedness for at least two reasons. (1) it kind of suggests women and people of color have more of a problem with it than others. NOT to say you meant that, but like, anyway. (2) there is kind of a tendency in our society to kick people in the head and then say, “why doesn’t the society for the prevention of kicking people in the head run better physical rehabilitation programs for brain injury victims instead of whining all the time?” By which I mean, maybe it’s the job of the head-kickers to effing cut it out, not the job of non-head-kickers to make it better afterward.
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.
Herman Melville
That really gets me as I have been one of those “deadbeats”.
Due to witnessing too many adults and classmates going into massive credit card debts growing up, I was unwilling to use credit cards until I found that many apartment buildings were refusing to rent to me because I had no credit history after I graduated. I had to have an older friend co-sign the rental agreement as my parents were recovering from problems caused by the recession of the early ’90s.
Once I received my first credit card, I remembered the dire consequences of getting into debt and made sure to pay off the balance in full when the bill came in each month. With a couple of exceptions after I was laid off during the dotcom bust, I have been pretty good about that.
Admittedly, a part of my ability to do this has been a strong aversion to the excesses of our disposable consumerist society which was influenced in part by the values my Chinese-American parents and relatives passed on to me. It is also a reason why I am conflicted on this issue.
I tend to be quite sympathetic to those in credit card debt who are undergoing insurmountable economic stresses from job losses, medical expenses, education expenses, etc as the amount of debt is not only massive, but also necessary and/or unforeseen. This sympathy is amplified for those on the lower end of the economic class ladder.
On the other hand, I have encountered too many college classmates and co-workers from upper/upper-middle class homes who spent themselves into serious debt because they had an exaggerated sense of entitlement which “necessitated” the “latest and greatest”. Most of those classmates and co-workers were not the stereotypical women who spent too much on clothing or jewelry, but young dudes who “had to” replace their expensive gaming PCs, electronics, furniture, and cars every 3-6 months.* My disinclination to sympathize with this overentitled group was aggravated by their obsession for the “latest and greatest” on the one hand….and their chronic open complaining about how and why they have enormous debt despite earning salaries two to three times my own.
Though I agree that credit card companies and the banking industry are predatory and should be condemned, I cannot help feeling that conflating the struggles of those who ended up in credit card debt due to insurmountable economic stresses…especially those on the lower end of the economic class ladder with upper/upper-middle class folks whose sense of overentitlement drove them into debt trivializes the grave problems faced by the former group.
* IME, the stereotype that women are frivolous overspenders is quite off. Nearly all of the worst frivolous overspenders I’ve met tended to be overentitled dudes from the higher end of the socio-economic ladder.
That really gets me as I have been one of those “deadbeats”.
Due to witnessing too many adults and classmates going into massive credit card debts growing up, I was unwilling to use credit cards until I found that many apartment buildings were refusing to rent to me because I had no credit history after I graduated. I had to have an older friend co-sign the rental agreement as my parents were recovering from problems caused by the recession of the early ’90s.
Once I received my first credit card, I remembered the dire consequences of getting into debt and made sure to pay off the balance in full when the bill came in each month. With a couple of exceptions after I was laid off during the dotcom bust, I have been pretty good about that.
Admittedly, a part of my ability to do this has been a strong aversion to the excesses of our disposable consumerist society which was influenced in part by the values my Chinese-American parents and relatives passed on to me. It is also a reason why I am conflicted on this issue.
I tend to be quite sympathetic to those in credit card debt who are undergoing insurmountable economic stresses from job losses, medical expenses, education expenses, etc as the amount of debt is not only massive, but also necessary and/or unforeseen. This sympathy is amplified for those on the lower end of the economic class ladder.
On the other hand, I have encountered too many college classmates and co-workers from upper/upper-middle class homes who spent themselves into serious debt because they had an exaggerated sense of entitlement which “necessitated” the “latest and greatest”. Most of those classmates and co-workers were not the stereotypical women who spent too much on clothing or jewelry, but young dudes who “had to” replace their expensive gaming PCs, electronics, furniture, and cars every 3-6 months.* My disinclination to sympathize with this overentitled group was aggravated by their obsession for the “latest and greatest” on the one hand….and their chronic open complaining about how and why they have enormous debt despite earning salaries two to three times my own.
Though I agree that credit card companies and the banking industry are predatory and should be condemned, I cannot help feeling that conflating the struggles of those who ended up in credit card debt due to insurmountable economic stresses…especially those on the lower end of the economic class ladder with upper/upper-middle class folks whose sense of overentitlement drove them into debt trivializes the grave problems faced by the former group.
* IME, the stereotype that women are frivolous overspenders is quite off. Nearly all of the worst frivolous overspenders I’ve met tended to be overentitled dudes from the higher end of the socio-economic ladder.
I worked briefly for MBNA years ago during a bad job period. I can’t tell you how many calls I got from people about the magic “credit insurance” that somehow appeared on their bills, the amazing swelling interest rates, and even the “residual interest rate” that somehow left people with more to pay after they paid off their balance. I believe this was the interest that accrued between the time the bill was printed and the payment received. But anyhow, after questioning these practices repeatedly with no one able to give me a straight answer, I was marched into an office for a “talk” with my manager about my “attitude”. I ran screaming after about four months and felt dirty for a long long time. The place was seriously like a cult — with 20 year old perky zombie managers that preached the gospel of greed in terms so ludicrous I couldn’t believe they actually bought into the bullshit. But they did. A little good health insurance and the constant promise of bonuses can go a long way….
I don’t have time to read all the comments just yet, so someone may have talked about this.
But on the subject of people who ran up credit card debt buying shiny crap like ipods and lattes and bar tabs and Sex and the City shoes and whatever-
Buying these things makes you feel good. If you’re working a crappy job you hate (that’s most of us) for long long hours, you live and work in a concrete veal crate of a city where you’re not getting any natural wilderness, you’re eating processed crap that is the majority of our modern diet and therefore, because of all this you are FUCKING MISERABLE and stressed out and you need a bit of pleasure, something to help dull the rest of it…
…so you think, ‘fine, I want to feel good just for a little bit.’ So you buy the latte. Or the ipod. Or the *insert consumer shiny thing here.’
I look at a lot of these ads and the products and they’re all marketed as things you ‘deserve’, things that will bring you happiness. The way we live and are more or less enslaved by our work makes us unhappy. And then, look! All those shiny, shiny consumer goods. Promising to make us happy.
Maybe I’m just having a paranoid moment, but THAT can’t be an accident.
I understand that there is a fair amount of capricious spending going on out there. But a lot of people who feel entitled to sit in judgement of those who are in debt have no idea how lucky they actually are. They have been able to draw endlessly from “Bank of Mom and Dad”‘ or they have gone into the world as twenty-somethings with a trust account, or have had a home to go to if living on their own on $11.00 an hour got to be unmanagable, or they had someone, somewhere, be able to bail them out, take care of them, provide a safety net, or otherwise give them a leg up.
I am now debt-free, (except for a minor car payment) but in my twenties..if it hadn’t been for credit cards, I would not have survived. I was thrust out on my own at 17, trying to go to college, work full time, and live with a severe illness. None of my enormous debt came from luxury items. I was driving an ‘79 Rabbit, which I depended to work full time and get to classes, and I lived on Top Ramen and rice and beans from the food bank. No medical insurance, no help from my parents, not nothing. When you need a doctor, you need a doctor. When you need to fix your radiator to the tune of $400.00 so you can keep working, you do it. When you are told that your clothes aren’t up to par enough to keep your crappy retail job selling shoes, you buck up and spend money on clothes. When I had to move out of an apartment after college due to a predator who moved in next door, I had to shell out $3,000 in deposits and first and last month rents. It is EXPENSE to live, even very simply.
Debt adds up fast, and hell yes, if I am working two jobs and still have to choose between groceries and heat, that $15.00 minimum payment on 3,000.00 balance is going to have to do, damn the consequences of a 30% rate hike. Am I going to claim that I never once spent a dime in credit on luxury item I couldn’t afford? No. But as another poster pointed out,when you feel like crap and you are working a total of 60 plus hours a week in shitty jobs and can barely make ends meet, you may occasionaly feel like buying a $30.00 bottle of perfume or a DVD to keep yourself from going completely apeshit.
I would just ask that people who come here and think that they feel entitled to judge others really take some time to honestly examine the privleges they have been given in their lives.
And, my husband and I now live totally without credit cards. We are planning a trip to a Europe next summer which we are paying for with savings. We are very responsible. We both have good jobs with a high level of resposibility. Because of past credit problems, we will NEVER be able to buy a house. Never. We have just written that off as a possibility.
Being poor or in bad circumstances for much of your life does not make you a bad person, or irresponsible scum.
Robin Rhea — your question is a reasonable one, but in a different way than you suppose. It’s like saying, “what’s the policy proposal for figuring out what to do once you are slathered in peanut butter and surrounded by angry bears?”
…
You are asking the question at the point where some kind of huge fuckup has already happened (desperate poor person, bad credit, etc.).
Just an aside — it seems that Robin is asking, “What options can we create to allow people to have access to credit so that covering themselves with PB and hoping to outrun the bear isn’t their only option?” And isn’t it funny, this just happens to be the option that ultimately leaves a very full and happy bear … Thinking about how to fix the problem before it happens.
I just-just-JUST got away with paying off my credit card, and it wasn’t even that huge an amount on it. When I tell people I used to wake up in a cold sweat because of my card debt, and then tell them “Five grand,” when they ask, they uniformly say, “OMFG! What were you scared about! That’s nothing!”
It didn’t feel like it to me, and it was mostly because it didn’t go the hell AWAY. Because of a protracted period of unemployment (two and a half years, the last year of which I was had NOTHING in the bank because I burned through my savings and severance during the first year and a half — I’m an effing pack-rat when it comes to money), that fucking debt just SAT THERE. It wasn’t budging and it Drove. Me. NUTS. Like Chinese water torture.
So with a good job now that’s relatively stable and pays fairly well (*crosses fingers with the coming downturn*), last year I just inhaled deeply, dropped my withholding, and threw gob after gob of money at the thing, gritting my teeth and pretty much putting myself in the mindset that I was ANGRY AS HELL at the card (anger is much better than fear for motivation — you wanna deal with your card debt? Get PISSED OFF, it works wonders) and that this was a fang and fur covered behemoth that was after me, and I was going to SMASH THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF IT until it bled pennies.
And I got the fucker to zero and I’m watching those assholes like a fucking HAWK now. I did it — now, I just hope to hell that I’ll stay employed, so I can do what I did for most of the 90s: allow myself my little extravagances but otherwise keep the same car for 22 years and live in a nice but small apartment, and put my surplus money into a savings account every month until it gets to around seven grand, then find index funds. That way, I can weather another storm not if but WHEN it comes. *crosses fingers so tight I’m cutting off the blood supply*
It’s funny how people react — my working-class background made me HELLA suspicious of ANYTHING that smacked of getting into debt. I still hear my father’s voice in my head saying things like, “Yeah, them bastards, never trust `em … ” When I get blank checks in the mail from the credit card company, it never occurs to me to use them unless I’m down to eating DIRT.
But I remember those nights spent waking up at 2am and lying there with my fists clenched, and I remember the occasional stupid-ass extravagance, and why I did it. It’s easy to say that you only have to tell yourself, “I have to cut back on my spending,” but it’s much harder when your brain follows it up with, “I have to cut back on my spending because OMG I AM IN DEBT UP TO MY EYEBALLS HOLY SHIT MY LIFE IS ENDING FEAR FEAR FEAR WATCH NOW AS I FLAIL MY ARMS AND RUN SCREAMING INTO THE NIGHT.”
It’s denial. I mean, if I’m buying that new iPod, then things CAN’T be that bad, can they? This shit’s scary, and like everyone’s saying, the system is set up so that people who find themselves sliding slightly to one side are instead pushed further and further from equilibrium instead of (in a sane system) gently encouraged to float back to the center, because Growth Uber Alles depends on it.
Actually MH, we are talking about me.
I didn’t read the Salon article. I’m not at Salon. I’m at Pandagon, and I read Amanda’s post.
Amanda was pointing out why so many people were sympathetic to the woman from the Salon article even though one would normally expect most people not to be. She pointed out that they are because so many of them are me. (And everyone else who pointed out how stupid your comment was.)
Therefore, we are fucking talking about me.
Do not use a line that is all about asking people to check their privilege at the door to argue something that fucking reeks of entitlement.
Tuition and medical bills are what finally drove me into credit card debt. I’m vaguely hopeful that someday I will qualify for a low-interest loan to pay off the cards.
Cymbal, what you just described is a trade-off that desperate people often make: concrete benefit now and abstract penalty later, versus concrete deprivation now and an abstract possibility of benefit later. When you’ve been struggling for your entire adult life just to make ends meet, that possibility looks more and more remote the older you get. Ugh.
Mixckle, the Salon article talks about a woman who went into crushing debt from non-necessities. In your first comment, you talk about the fact that your expenses were all quite necessary, and listed them scrupulously.
It doesn’t seem like the same “me” to me.
Mickle, you may of course talk about yourself if you like. Like most issues raised here, credit card debt has many facets to discuss. But _I_ am not discussing you, or other people in similar situations, and neither am I trying to silence you or belittle your experiences.
Moving on.
Well, I don’t know if it’s accurate to say that gender plays no role here (if that is what you are saying). I think the point made upthread about women having more expenses (makeup, less durable clothes, etc.) needed to maintain society’s standards is a valid one, and dovetails very nastily with women’s lower average pay. They earn less and cost more - a double-pincher, which frankly I think makes the spending habits of some men such as exholt describes even more unseemly. Certainly it’s not a problem isolated to one gender, but that doesn’t mean it affects both genders equally.
On the subject of lamenting the economic crash, should the mass of consumers stop, well, consuming: I gotta say…so what?
Yes, that would cause a huge crash. But the thing is, there is not and never will be a good time make the switch from a growth-dependent economy to a more sustainable one. Whenever it happens, it’s going to suck, and suck hard, so I guess I’d ask: is there a reason to suppose one time or place would result in a softer landing than another? It’s got to happen eventually, and it seems to me that the world economy and the USA’s in particular will be better off if the crash happens at a time and manner of our choosing rather than waiting until we’re forced.
We simply cannot keep growing forever, so the most important questions ought to be: what are our options for stopping that growth, and what are the implications (both short-term and long-term) of each?What are the costs (and, I suppose, the benefits) of putting off that crash until a later date?
If it’s inevitable as it’s made out to be, then there’s no sense in lamenting about how awful it is (apart from learning how to avoid doing it again), and instead it’s better to make preparations for dealing with the coming troubles. Does anyone have ideas about that?
My macro-economics-fu isn’t anything to brag about, so I might well be wrong. Perhaps it’s not so inevitable - is there a way we could make that transition slowly, to cushion the blow? To choose a depression over a crash, or a recession over a depression?
I’m never quite sure when Amanda is serious with her OTT anti-male sexism, and when she’s using it for comedic/dramatic effect, but whichever this one was, I have to admit that I LOL’ed.
“And this guy nails it, though the weird sexual metaphor is off-putting and unnecessary.”
Coming literally one paragraph after a waterboarded analogy tying denial of entirely self-inflicted credit card debt to the dawning realization of the sins of an evil, cheating husband, this gets the “pot, meet kettle” award of the week.
MH: I have never understood what is so hard about not accumulating consumer debt
Quite simple, really. If your job pays less than rent+utilities, you go in debt to eat. If it pays less than rent+utilities+food, you go in debt when you need shoes, or when your roommate spends the grocery money on beer. (Cheap place to live = broke roommates = more trouble).
It’s easy to say, “I can’t afford that”. You know it. All the time. But when you cannot even afford the food you eat, you either become insane, or develop some kind of “oh, what the heck” mentality, when it isn’t that important what you can’t afford. Poor people are just as human as not-poor ones, and, being human, getting shiny things makes us happy. So, if you do not have anything else to be happy about, why not buy pretty clothes? Better to have pretty clothes and crushing debt than ugly clothes and crushing debt. Besides, pretty clothes might just help you find a better-paying job, or any job at all. The debt won’t go anywhere. And that mindset, unfortunately, stays in your lizard brain even if your finances recover to the point where budgeting might make a difference. Like famine can destroy a person’s ability to pace their eating, poverty and debt can destroy the ability to budget — because survival mechanisms are not easily discarded.
(Another self-destructing survival mechanism: The assumption that things will work out somehow and that tomorrow will be better than today. Lacking this optimism is just as self-destructing though and might get you diagnosed as suffering from depression.)
And that’s before the systematic traps to keep you in debt kick in…
Jennifer, I know I should get one. But… I can’t deal with having one.
You have probably heard this before and I don’t even know if it’s feasible in the US, but on the off change that it is of some use: Get one. Get cash from an ATM with it. Put the cash safely away (ideally on a bank account where you get a bonus for opening it). Destroy the card. Pay the debt from the set-aside money.
People make irrational decisions (economic or otherwise) for all sorts of very complicated reasons. Surely we should all know this by now?
Just saying “Well, you made an irrational decision, so you deserve everything you get” is not a productive approach. You need to address the reasons why people are making those decisions. And in the case of credit card debt, it’s largely because there’s several multi-billion dollar multinational businesses specifically dedicated to encouraging people to make those decisions.
Anybody expecting people to be rational decision-makers needs to grow the fuck up and get their heads out of their asses already. It’’s completely irrational, not to mention obviously counter-factual, to imagine that people might be rational decision-makers.
“….then you aren’t the debtor we’re talking about. So chill out.”
“….and neither am I trying to silence you or belittle your experiences.”
That’s a nice shift from “we” to “me.”
I’m not an idiot. I am quite aware that I am not the type of person that you were trying to talk about in your first comment. Clearly, however, my kind of debt is the focus of the larger conversation. Therefore, I, personally, find your attempt to shift the conversation to “people in [other] situations” to be remarkably similar to people who come onto threads about rape and say “but I want to talk about those women that lie about rape/do dangerous things/etc.”
You can talk about the few people that just have no self control all you want, but that isn’t the vast majority of people. They aren’t who is making this a crisis. By focusing on them, you are distracting the conversation away from talk of how to fix the actual problem.
Thus, your comment about this “not being about” me was incredibly privileged and stupid.
*****
The question I want answered is why my credit card keeps thinking it’s a great idea to up my limit without my asking them to, especially when I’ve only been paying the interest for quite a while now. This is in addition to giving me an insanely high limit when I first got it as a college student.
At what point do the credit card companies pay for their stupidity?
Our credit card debt skyrocketed after we had our baby. We had underestimated how much more it would cost and for the first year we did things like buy groceries on credit ‘just this once.’ ‘Just this once’ quickly became every two weeks though and we had crazy debt before we even started thinking about it.
We are lucky though, to be members of a credit union that gave us a low-interest loan to pay off the credit cards. We paid them and closed them and now are working on getting rid of the loan. If we had been stuck paying off the credit cards it would have taken twice as long because of the exorbitant interest.
The day I called to cancel one card they offered to double our credit line because we were ’such good customers.’ I declined, of course.
I hate the credit card companies. Soulless vampires. Hate them.
And this doesn’t even begin to address my complicated relationship with Sallie Mae.
So wait, why don’t people deserve sympathy for having to go into debt to have a fucking pair of shoes?
What kind of asshole bases his argument on “well they deserve to be scorned because they like having nice things. Gosh, those monsters.”
A single person with a full-time job and no extraordinary expenses should have the money to make occasional discretionary purchases and that they don’t is the result of systemic and far-ranging economic imbalances.
MH, it’s super that you love fourthhand furniture and ratty old shoes that hard but that doesn’t mean people who like wearing nice clothes should be punished because a tiny fraction of the population hoardes all the wealth for themselves.
Going into debt for a few pairs of shoes because of sheer necessity is one thing (i.e. personal health, perceived public health, employment, social, etc).
Going into debt because one has an overentitled upper/upper-middle class mentality of “gotta have” the latest and greatest shoes/(insert any discretionary/luxury item here) when the ones in their current possession are in good to perfect condition is totally something else.
I have sympathy for the former, especially those on the lower end of the socio-economic ladder as I have been there myself. I have little patience with the latter group as they are not only irrational, but downright wasteful.
Your tone seems to indicate that there is something sketchy about loving used/old items that may still be in good to perfect condition. This attitude typified the mentality of the overentitled upper/upper-middle class classmates and co-workers I’ve encountered. In fact, that statement has a similar tone to ones my upper/upper-middle class spendthrift co-workers used to make about me for not conforming to their lavishly wasteful lifestyle.