So wait, why don’t people deserve sympathy for having to go into debt to have a fucking pair of shoes?

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

“….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?

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.

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.

“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.

Moving on.

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.

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?

It doesn’t seem like the same “me” to me.

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.