Who needs social media?
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@HardwareGeek said:
@morbiuswilters said:
(BTW, I've been unemployed. It sucked, but I lived.)
Yeah. It cost me my house, my marriage, my family and a good bit of my dignity, but I survived.Then your wife was either a whore or a gold-digger, good riddance. Unless you started wearing white socks and sandals while you were watching daytime tv - in which case you are to blame.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@HardwareGeek said:
I meant I couldn't even fathom the idea that someone might think the "safety net" would protect their cable TV. Rhetorical, I know, but it's still mind-boggling.I can't even...
Also, I'm not sure what you're going for here.
Our house was not an overpriced McMansion. It was a modest, affordable (by Bay Area standards, at least), 40-year-old house in a quiet suburban neighborhood that was worth more than we owed on it. Yes, we should have owed much less; we spent way too much fixing it up in ways that didn't add appreciably to its resale value, and paying for it with our equity. That was a bad decision, or rather a string of bad decisions. I knew at the time they were bad decisions; I just didn't realize how bad until it was too late.
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@Ronald said:
Then your wife was either a whore or a gold-digger, good riddance.
None of the above. There were other problems in the marriage, even worse than our financial troubles. But they were among the biggest nails in the coffin. Without them, I think we could have made it.
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@HardwareGeek said:
Why? Because I wasn't man enough to say "no" to my (now ex-)wife's overspending.
Well, I don't know about "man enough", but maybe "wise enough"? I'm not trying to be a dick here, but who else can you blame for going along with your wife's crazy plans?
@HardwareGeek said:
We could pay it back* as long as I was working.
* Mostly. I knew we were overextended, but we were getting by with the help of tax refunds, semi-annual bonuses and occasional cashing-in of stock options.
So you were barely paying it back. And you apparently had no emergency fund, should you find yourself unemployed.
@HardwareGeek said:
They were not typical of the people I saw in the office. I saw mostly – how can I put this so it doesn't sound like it belongs in the thread about stealing silverware – non-Anglo women with lots of young children and some guys who looked like they wouldn't pass a job interview for cleaning septic tanks.
Yeah, that's the welfare office. Although there are lots of whities taking advantage of it, too, although you may not have seen them in your area. (Also, whitey tends to get handle his bennies online. Which I always thought was kind of dear. Wanna guess the over-under on when the first iPhone app that lets you sign up for welfare comes out in the US? I predict by the end of the Obama Administration..)
@HardwareGeek said:
I suppose there are ways of falsifying your income to get more than you are eligible for.
Of course there are. You don't think those people in line were reporting the income they make from selling drugs, do you? (Although, for many it may have dwarfed by what they spent on drugs..)
@HardwareGeek said:
IIRC, I legitimately qualified for a bit over $300/month.
Still, if you can't feed a family of four comfortably on $300 /month, something is dreadfully wrong. Yes, you have to give up the high-priced name brands and organic, free-range hogwash, but you can make do. I was probably 12 before I found out "Dr. Thunder" wasn't a real name brand and was just ripping off Dr. Pepper.
@HardwareGeek said:
We got to the point where we literally didn't have enough money to file for bankruptcy.
Seriously? Most states make it pretty easy.
@HardwareGeek said:
All I really wanted was a job, but nobody was lining up to give me that, either.
Yeah, it can be tough. At least maybe you've learned the importance of having plans and money stashed away and self-reliance. I'm very sorry you had to learn it the hard way, though, I really am.
@HardwareGeek said:
Yeah. It cost me my house, my marriage, my family and a good bit of my dignity, but I survived.
The house was more than you could manage and your wife sounds like trouble. I'm sorry about the rest, though.
Overall, this just drives home what I was saying, I think: low interest rates and easy credit made digging yourself into deep debt a lot easier than it should have been. It did that to a lot of people. The decisions you made were generally rational, because it seemed like it was smooth sailing. It created a really bad feedback effect, too, where all that easy credit was chasing the same houses, driving up the prices and making housing seem like an "investment" (housing is not an investment.) Then people panicked and suddenly everyone was busy screaming "Not it!" and fleeing from any responsibility for the mess they'd made.
And unfortunately, rather than fix the core problem, we've just doubled- and tripled-down on increasing debt. We've blown another housing bubble, government debt bubbles and a big, stinking student loan bubble. And then there's Europe, who's looking more and more like a guy who bought a McMansion in 2006 for $700k and is now finding out it's worth about $13 and the entire Greek GDP (which is apparently less than $13). And the US has been like "Sure, we'll bail you out", by which we mean "We'll string you along so that your implosion happens gradually--like one of those cool videos of a casino imploding in slow motion!--and is drawn out over a decade rather than letting you get onto the business of fixing shit."
So, yeah, things are probably gonna get real bad again.
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@HardwareGeek said:
I meant I couldn't even fathom the idea that someone might think the "safety net" would protect their cable TV.
Shit, have you ever been to the ghetto? Every house has 500 channels of cable (or DirecTV, if they're slumming it.)
@HardwareGeek said:
Our house was not an overpriced McMansion. It was a modest, affordable (by Bay Area standards, at least), 40-year-old house in a quiet suburban neighborhood that was worth more than we owed on it.
Fair enough. I wasn't trying to be a dick about the McMansion thing, it's just that's how a lot of people got themselves into trouble.
@HardwareGeek said:
Yes, we should have owed much less; we spent way too much fixing it up in ways that didn't add appreciably to its resale value, and paying for it with our equity. That was a bad decision, or rather a string of bad decisions. I knew at the time they were bad decisions; I just didn't realize how bad until it was too late.
Yeah, sounds pretty sucky, man. Although: Bay area? I know everyone was hit by the Great Recession, but the Bay area seemed less so than most. Then again, I guess you're in hardware, so it may an entirely different ballgame for you guys.
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@HardwareGeek said:
@Ronald said:
Then your wife was either a whore or a gold-digger, good riddance.
None of the above. There were other problems in the marriage, even worse than our financial troubles. But they were among the biggest nails in the coffin. Without them, I think we could have made it.Hmm.. it sounds like you dodged a bullet. (Well, not completely dodged, I guess..) I mean, "even worse than our financial troubles" to me says "the financial trouble maybe saved me from something even worse."
