from the last-remaining-part-of-the-social-safety-net dept.
Personal bankruptcy among seniors has been growing over the last 25+ years, according to a recent study reported by the NY Times and syndicated nationally, for example at: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/too-little-too-late-bankruptcy-booms-among-older-americans/
The signs of potential trouble — vanishing pensions, soaring medical expenses, inadequate savings — have been building for years. Now, new research sheds light on the scope of the problem: The rate of people 65 and older filing for bankruptcy is three times what it was in 1991, the study found, and the same group accounts for a far greater share of all filers.
Driving the surge, the study suggests, is a three-decade shift of financial risk from government and employers to individuals, who are bearing an ever-greater responsibility for their own financial well-being as the social safety net shrinks.
The transfer has come in the form of, among other things, longer waits for full Social Security benefits, the replacement of employer-provided pensions with 401(k) savings plans and more out-of-pocket spending on health care. Declining incomes, whether in retirement or leading up to it, compound the challenge.
Your AC's google-fu wasn't sufficient to locate the original report, but here is another quote from the Seattle Times link,
As the study, from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, explains, older people whose finances are precarious have few places to turn. "When the costs of aging are offloaded onto a population that simply does not have access to adequate resources, something has to give," the study says, "and older Americans turn to what little is left of the social safety net — bankruptcy court."
"You can manage OK until there is a little stumble," said Deborah Thorne, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Idaho and an author of the study. "It doesn't even take a big thing."
To show that this isn't something new, here's an NPR report from 10 years ago, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93241953
SEABROOK: So how does that play out for older Americans?
Prof. WARREN: Well let me put it this way. Back in 1991, older Americans, those over 55, were about eight percent of all the people filing for bankruptcy. Today, they're about 25 percent of those filing for bankruptcy. It's been a real shift in the demographics.
The median age and the population, generally, has increased by about three years. The median age in bankruptcy has increased in the same time period by about seven years.
Compare with the currently running story about wages and benefits climbing currently, https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/08/05/016226
Related Stories
Marketwatch brings good news for the USA: American workers are finally reaping the benefits of the lowest unemployment rate and best jobs market in decades: Wages and benefits are rising at the fastest pace in a decade. Firms have sought to fill openings by offering better benefits such as more vacation time or flexible hours. When push comes to shove, they are offering higher pay. While bigger paychecks are great for workers, the US Federal Reserve is watching closely to see if rising compensation is stoking inflation. The Federal Reserve could increase U.S. interest rates if it becomes a big worry, but so far inflation remains relatively mild.
(Score: 2) by YeaWhatevs on Wednesday August 08 2018, @06:23AM (14 children)
Not enough $$$
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @06:45AM (5 children)
Soo many boomers, what have you done with the so much money money they earned over their life-time?
Bankrupt companies do not pay pensions, right? What about the acquisition-then-shutdown mergers?
You tricked them in relying on your corporations and then let those corporations to silently discard the responsibility, haven't you?
You diluted their money with boom-bust and inflation cycles, then vacuumed the diluted solution into the coffers on the new corporations anyway, haven't you?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday August 08 2018, @10:35AM (1 child)
For the life of me I cannot fathom why organize labor always wants pensions that their employers pay. What if their employer isn't making enough money?
Live Picture went tits up in the late 90s, but some manner of caretaker in Delaware is still looking after my 401k.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:04PM
It's a cheap promise by union leaders to keep union members happy. Not their problem two decades later when things stop working.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:23PM
Silly boomers, should have invested in bitcoin.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday August 08 2018, @06:04PM
And they will have absolutely no shame asking for a bailout for themselves after decrying the nanny-state for the last 50 years.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:21PM
There's a lot to that. For some reason the courts failed to treat pensions as a hard obligation even though is was supposed to amount to deferred payroll. But of course, the courts put the banks at the front of the line for payment and the peons went to the back.
Surprise surprise, Wall Street and the financial sector are now reporting record profits and the boomers can't retire. And since the boomers can't retire, the generations that follow them are un/under-employed and can't even start building their own retirement.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:20PM (5 children)
I'm nearing retirement age (mid-60s). My parents (from Great Depression era) made it clear that living within my means was a good thing and I've taken that advice. While they had a few luxuries, they weren't conspicuous consumers. But many of my peers (boomers) didn't seem to get the same message. I wonder if part of the blame goes on schools (and curriculum designers) for not offering at least a little bit of financial education for those that didn't get it at home.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RS3 on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:21PM (3 children)
Interestingly, the cost of education, local public schools as well as colleges / universities, has risen far faster than averaged inflation, and those costs have drained much of the $ from the lower and middle-class boomers.
Yes, one of my standing complaints with the "education system" in US is that I did not have 1 day of teaching about finance nor economics in general. Had to learn all about the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Boxer Rebellion, dangling participles and diphthongs, but nothing about money. Hmm... I wonder what that means...
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @02:23PM (2 children)
Direct consequence of cheap credit and federally backed loans leading to price inflation. [investors.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Wednesday August 08 2018, @09:39PM (1 child)
Absolutely. Money-supply economics is a thing, and not considered enough. People are amazingly opportunistic and find where money is and dip into that stream. My bigger gripe is with the public school system spending money however they like and raising taxes every year. Who is representing us, the taxpayer? Okay, I hear people moaning about underpaid teachers, and it is very true in some places. But in my area, teachers are some of the highest paid in the US. I know many, some well, and they have much easier jobs than I ever have, summers off, lots of holidays and other days off. Sorry- I know them, and they admit it's easy work for reasonable pay. What bugs me is the money is too easy for the school administrators to come by.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @11:28PM
Regularly work with uni tech staff - almost twice the salary of an engineer in the private sector and take twice as long to complete a task.
Yes, that too! The number of administrators increased, [theatlantic.com] adjunct teaching staff increased while tenured professors decreased. How is it even possible to need more administrative staff when we have ever more powerful computers?
(Score: 1) by kramulous on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:30AM
While I do enjoy a little boomer bashing from time to time, I don't actually blame them, or any other generation, for their consumer behaviours.
There are so many very powerful psychological techniques that are being employed to sell us anything and everything that you need to be an outlier to be able to ignore them. The baby boomers were just the first generation that felt these effects.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 08 2018, @06:22PM
When the president sets the precedent, you'd expect his followers to follow suit.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @09:42PM
Every option suffers from the same fatal flaw. Pensions, 401K, welfare like social security... all are, in some sense, the same: today's old people must be cared for by today's young people.
None of that can work reliably. When a surge of working people unbalances the system by supplying value, the costs of investments go up and the cost of labor goes down. When they become old, they all want to sell of their investments at the same time, and thus the value plunges. Meanwhile, there are few workers, so the cost of labor goes up.
The government can't really get around this. Mandating that labor stay cheap will just cause shortages. They could force people to work as slaves, but then the worker shortage causes labor costs to rise elsewhere in the economy. Mandating that the investments supply great value will just screw up the currency with hyperinflation.
Fundamentally, it is impossible to have investment success for a group like the baby boomers. This includes pseudo-investment things like social security. The money entered into the system doesn't really exist. Even if it were physically hoarded as piles of case, it wouldn't really exist because releasing the stores of cash would cause inflation. There just aren't enough workers.
You can't even import suitable workers. We get people who hate our culture, refuse to speak our language, and want our elderly to hurry up and die. These people are relatively unproductive and will themselves need care when they get old.
Robots? Oh, maybe... and Japan is trying it. Old people tend to want human contact. Robots are not anywhere near capable enough.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday August 08 2018, @06:50AM (7 children)
OTOH, where was all the money for those schemes going to come from? Most of the items mentioned involve transfers of wealth from the young to the elderly and involved substantial cost growth that had to be contained in order for the schemes to survive into the future. Well, the young are in poor straits right now and not as numerous as they used to be. So that wealth transfer just isn't going to happen smoothly like it did with past generations which had a higher young to old ratio.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @07:07AM (2 children)
Was it by incompetence or by malice?
On one side they knew the "efficiency" will go up (thus the total wages will go down) - that is one of the tenets of capitalism; on the other side they were happy to promise the youngsters will help them at retirement through a scheme that involved parting the "protected" by their money first.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 08 2018, @11:53AM (1 child)
"They" didn't know that because that isn't true. The more efficiently we use labor, the more valuable and in demand it becomes. That's how it's working in the developing world in places like China.
That is a tenet of Marxism which is an anti-capitalist creed. Capitalism typically believes in positive sum game when it comes to employment. Such a blatant misattribution is very Orwellian.
Social welfare schemes have nothing to do with capitalism aside from them being more affordable in capitalist systems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:00PM
The "cheap thing you get from the Pound shops, don't be angry when they don't work" type of affordable?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @04:13PM (3 children)
> OTOH, where was all the money for those schemes going to come from?
An easy target would be the "defense" budget. If it was actually a defense budget instead of an offense budget, and had just a bit less pork for military contractors, then there would be plenty to make up the small shortfall in US Social Security due to the boomers all retiring at once.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @05:05PM (2 children)
Um... I hope you realize that Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid make up 50% of the federal budget, and the defense budget is 16%. It could sort-of cover SS, because that's not completely out of whack yet, but it can't cover both SS and Medicare, especially if you ignore the dodgy accounting the government allows itself to use but would hammer a corporation for using.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @06:00PM
Looks like we might agree that health care (Medicare on the federal side) is out of control which is why I wrote SS specifically.
Is SN due for another debate on how to rein in US health care costs and get them more in line with other countries? A few years ago I read a book called Health Care USA which is an overview of all the different parts of the health system, from patients thru MDs, pharma, insurance and the State/Feds, as well as all the people that work in the system in non-medical capacities. While the book is aimed at students getting into the system (in nearly any capacity) and may be a required text for an intro course, it gives a good view of the whole sector "from orbit". Looks to me like just about everyone involved shares the blame, even patients if they don't research and follow up on spurious charges.
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:19AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @07:46AM (5 children)
The ones that get me are these incessant ads for "Senior Insurance" and "Reverse Mortgages", being heavily marketed to today's retirees by has-been TV personalities.
Before you consider one of these, do the math. The ads I have heard were so full of businesstalk that one actually call the number, and may even have to buy the stuff, to find out what it covers and how much. They are full of trickytalk about "only pennies a day", and slip in things like "per unit", so they don't have to say over the air what you are getting.
My neighbor, and elderly grandma, fell for the reverse mortgage. She always had lots of "gifts" for her grandkids! I think you know the kind of "gifts" I am talking about... that expensive stuff that spoils kids into thinking everything comes easy as long as you sign promissory notes. The day came, she passed on. Her son and daughter were both caught up in that 2007 depression as well, and were losing their homes. It came as a cruel surprise to them that the old family home they were raised up in, and they thought it was free and clear? Well, it wasn't anymore. Grandma saw to that. I thought it so ironic the little grandkids were running around with their X-boxes, and expensive little motorized my ponies... while their mom and dad went through forclosure on not only their own house, but grandma's house as well. Banks ended up with the whole family fortune by wagging big money in front of grandma. I see them daily using the memes of yesteryear's old TV stars to implant the meme to not leave anything for one's kids! Wipe out the family fortune right here and now... a fortune that had taken generations to build up, but who is to argue with a rich old geezer pictured in the corner of the ad, well dressed, head bobbling, erupting all the pleasures one could be enjoying by signing a few papers.
And the insurance? "Don't leave your loved ones paying your debt?", Look at that thing and compare it to a savings account. Not only that, once they have my money, what are my loved ones going to have to go through or prove to get what I paid for them? You think I want to leave any loved ones of mine reams of businesstalk to fish through?
Its damn easy to give money to a business. Ever tried to get any back? Why would any profit making corporation be concerned with my satisfaction at that point anyway? I'm cremated! I remember all too well when a well-meaning friend gave me a Wherehouse Gift Card. Supposedly worth $25. I kept it for several years before I tried to use it, then was told it was worth substantially less than face value. Fees. In fine print. On the back. Another Profit-Maker for the Business! Who cares if the old man they pulled it on will never trust another Business again, and every time a Business presents a paper with fine print on it, the old man gets really pissed and thinks the Business is out to defraud him? Can't tell you how many times subsequent to that where I have had a salesman complete his spiel, sell me on something, then begins closing, where the salesman gives me a paper with fine print on it, and now the customer, burned before, makes a big deal of it and insists the salesman sign a codicil to contract, disavowing the legal validity of any print less than 12 point, as well as contrast failing to meet a certain ISO constrast rating, on the grounds that he is old and will not be held legally accountable for anything he can't read.
The salesman invariably refuses to sign. Now the customer is ready to close, and puzzled to why the salesman is holding up the sale? The salesman wants a piece of paper signed. The customer wants a piece of paper signed too. The customer knows the "ABC's of Salesmanship: Always Be Closing", and keeps asking what its gonna take to "get to Yes" from the salesman. Every time the salesman says "just sign and we are good to go!", the customer presents his paper and says the same damned thing!
(Score: 4, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday August 08 2018, @10:45AM
I once owned a house. I bought it when times were good.
Beneficial Finance sent me a check for an unsecured seven-thousand dollar loan. After examining it quite carefully I deposited it then used the money to get my stuff shipped from California to Maine.
Beneficial intended that unsecured loan to provide them a foot in my door to make an incredibly usurous second mortgage. They made two offers, both for twenty grand.
I carefully read the fine print on the disclosure form which by law Beneficial was required to fill out accurately and to give to me. In very small text was _penciled_ in 18% interest. I called them back: "Eighteen percent for a secured loan? Are you out of your mind?" Click.
A few months later they called me back, promised not to do that again, again they offer a second for twenty grand at a far-lower interest rate. Again I read the disclosure: $20,000 in points that I didn't have to pay up front, rather they were to be added to the amount that I borrowed.
I wish now that I had kept both disclosure forms. I didn't because this was during the dot-com crash and I just had too many things to deal with. But Beneficial made _both_ home equity loan offers after agreeing to a $100 million settlement in a complaint brought by the Feds which accused them of intentionally making usurous loans so they could foreclose then sell the foreclosed homes. The settlement also stipulated that Beneficial promised not to do that again.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @02:02PM (3 children)
What I am reading here is that the expectation was that the parents were unable to save, and thus expected Grandma's savings to bail them out.
Grandma was not too big to fail, and not only that, if she received such a reverse mortgage, it probably was true that she needed a bailout herself. That saved her, and let her age out her timer and die apparently gracefully.
I don't know why I am upset that people expect an inheritance to solve their financial troubles. I told my own parents to spend their money; that it would be nice if they left something for us kids, but ultimately they already raised me and I moved out. Anything after that is a bonus. I would rather have them live in comfort than worry about how I have some sort of expectation for their money when I can finally pull it out of their cold, dead hands. I have no sympathy for people that expect to receive money as an inheritance. Financial planning should only involve the expenses resulting in the death of another person, not the one-time bonus to bail our one's own inability to consider setting aside money so one's own children can hold the same expectations about when you die.
It might be better to actually talk to your parents about their finances. I can only hope the xbox went up on ebay to pay for the college expenses that I am sure the parents were not contributing towards because they expected someone else to pay for it. (and realistically, the kids should be paying some of their own way, but I expect that they have been conditioned to believe mom and dad will handle everything since it seems that is what mom and dad were conditioned that way themselves.
You're right about the gift cards. They go down in value in many countries and states, provided there is no law against excessive 'management' fees. Those guys should be paying interest, and instead they charge a fee. If grandma loves you, she will not give you a gift card purchased with a reverse mortgage source of funding.
as to sales people, yes the goal is to screw the other side in a way that makes everyone happy. It doesn't work as well when both sides are trying to operate the screw driver at once.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:07AM
Like good Consumers. The vast majority of the things people think they 'need' and waste their money to get are totally unnecessary and do not even make them happier.
It's the same for kids depending on inheritance money. Oftentimes, they simply wasted their own money and now don't have any. People have this mindset that they need all these shiny goodies, but they become more poor because of it.
Because everyone has to go to college, for some reason. Even though it's perfectly possible to educate oneself in the 21st century, as we all know, knowledge only exists in schools. Unless someone's profession requires them to have a degree by law, I would try to seek out employers that don't play the credentialism game, rather than going into debt.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:34AM (1 child)
They seem about as bas as a ponzi scheme where each month you become the bigger idiot.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @10:15AM
> Holy moley, I'd never heard of a reverse mortgage before
Another poster child for financial education in grade schools.
https://www.americanadvisorsgroup.com/news/history-reverse-mortgage [americanadvisorsgroup.com]
It seems like it started out as a good thing, for specific circumstances...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @08:59AM (2 children)
It's much more sensible for Millennials to blame Baby Boomers for socioeconomic troubles than blaming politicians and big finance who've exploited and suckered every generation for centuries.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 08 2018, @09:13AM (1 child)
The next generation won't be able to blame the boomers though. Here's for the hope they'll be able to identify the real culprit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:15PM
Even neo-corporatists like Clinton admin labor secretary Robert forth Reich manage to get this one right. [nytimes.com] The political will isn't there to fix the problems while people are distracted, encouraged to blame ideological bogeymen and to fight amongst themselves.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @10:01AM (7 children)
68 and retired. I don't make a lot of money anymore. Mostly social security and a small pension. But its enough to pay my everyday living expenses and a little to spare.
However, I was raised during a completely different mindset. Both of my parents had lived through the depression. And that had left a mindset on them which they lived within their means, and taught me to do likewise. They knew things could collapse, and saw to it we kids were given the tools to survive... for me, it was an engineering education, as I believe my dad knew I was autistic or asperger or something like that... whatever it was, I never was very social. All I seemed to want to do was take stuff apart to see how it worked. The social stuff, nor most of the stuff they tried to teach me at school did not mean a thing to me. Sis got into marketing, and my brother got into the performing arts and later teaching... and he's damned good at it too.
In that day, the family treasures went down the family tree by inheritances. However, my Dad and Uncles got the short end of the stick on that one as the family farm we had was sold off to pay Grandma's nursing home bills, as she stayed alive, but needed assistance, for several decades after Gramps died. I guess what I am trying to say is that many middle class families had family money to fall back on, instead of paying insane amounts of usury to banks.
But these days, it seems few of us have resisted the siren-calls of the businessmen and their cadres of advertising agencies. We have lived beyond our means, thinking "fine houses" and cars was an investment. When all it really was was an enforcer to spend yet more resources to "protect our investment".
I see daily one of the young technicians at a small electronics shop I hang out a lot at. ( I can't stop doing electronics, but the owner of the shop lets me pursue some of my personal projects there in exchange for any wisdom I may have to offer to help the other guys out over there. ) This guy is the same age as my nephews. When I was his age, I was debt free, renting, and saving up for a down payment for a house. Contrast my situation to the new tech's situation... he's damn near a quarter million dollars in debt already! Student loans. Both him and his wife. Both working. Both paying tax up the gizwah ( no kids ). Nor does he seem to take debt seriously... he will spend anything he can get someone to loan him. Cameras. Musical instruments. Drones. Vacations. Getaways. Brand new top of the line SUV. Living Paycheck to paycheck. I would feel like I was going down Route 66 between Barstow and Kingman at 80 MPH in a BMW. ( Hint: Route 66 is poorly maintained in that area... I even aborted a 35MPH foray onto that road in my big diesel van because I thought all I was doing was tearing up the suspension in the thing ). These kids are being brought up used to the idea of living under such a mountain of debt that one missed payment somewhere will cause a cascade failure of losing everything... but the meme being you never had anything to begin with, so what's the deal? The meme seems to have changed. You do not have wealth. Instead, you have a credit rating. And you spend your life paying usury. His forseeable future has already been mortaged off to pay for the past.
I get the strong idea that he is not an outlier; rather he is representative of the new generation. A generation born into debt, and accept it as a way of life, where I was raised to avoid it like the plague. This whole thing looks like a house of cards just waiting to collapse to me. I see torrents of ads directed at me trying to get me to reverse-mortgage my stuff, and I think it is plain wrong to die in debt; best plan to leave some to the kids, but its a futile game if the businessmen already have them trained to spend every dime they get their hands on. I would hate to wake up every morning to the question of which debtor is screaming the loudest and how to get whatever it takes to shut it up.
(Score: 4, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday August 08 2018, @10:50AM
In the words of the immortal Inspector Clouseau: Not Anymore [warplife.com].
Here's how to deal with a bill collector: "I'm homeless. The only reason I get to eat is soup kitchens."
They never called back again.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:16PM (5 children)
You can't seriously tell me that you never ran into that kind of person when you were young. For example, despite the passage of the years, I'm still running into people like that who are well over 60. Sometimes they still haven't learned despite living a whole life.
What changed is that no one would have loaned him that kind of money in the past. Plenty of people live paycheck to paycheck and make poor, short-sighted financial decisions. Not everyone of those owes a quarter of a million in nondischargeable student loans, guaranteed by the US federal government. Even now, there's young people who make good decisions just like there was way back when. Don't characterize an entire generation by its weakest members.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @02:06PM (2 children)
Khallow, there are people like this all over the world--to the extent that articles are written about how they are handling their old age after a life of treating credit like discretionary income--and how people that behaved differently are experiencing a different type of retirement that doesn't include bankruptcy.
Sometimes, that 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' also means wearing the same old boots and replacing the laces when they fray, rather than getting the new high tech ones that sync to only the newest models of flagship android phones.
but the marketing doesn't ever really talk about responsibility, because that diminishes shareholder value.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @02:54PM (1 child)
While states treated exponential growth as a possibility and will attempt to palm off pension liabilities to the tax payer. [dollarcollapse.com] "Experts" they said!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:23AM
"Attempt" is a rather weak word to use here when many of those states (both US states and country-level governments) have succeeded for decades. It might not be coincidence that an ignorance electorate tends to have an ignorant government.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @02:11PM (1 child)
AC Senior Parent again...
Yes, I did see some of that at University. Usually kid of rich parents. Spent like there was no tomorrow... but like you say, no one would have loaned him that kind of money, so the debt situation did not exist. There were those who went into debt, and I remember watching most of them crash and burn...
They were in and out of payday loan centers ( note their logo [paydaymoneycenters.com] is either a crown, or a pair of handcuffs, according to how you look at it!) for the rest of their lives.
In those days, the Government was not so "Jonny-on-the-spot" with bailouts, so if the bank loaned money and didn't get it back, they took the hit directly.
My belief that all these government bailouts are to shield the banks from loss, by keeping the debtor from walking away, keeping him trapped in the contract.
But they phrase it as "helping the homeowner" because that sounds better to the public whose taxes are being used to bail out the banks in this manner.
I will characterize it as I see it... I see the younger generation doing stuff that I was trained not to do, as well as using tools ( especially things like social media ) which to me is risky. But I also know I have gotten older, and prone to the very same things I sullied my Dad's generation for. Especially things like not being "flexible" and "resistant to change".
I am not blaming the younger generation, but I do feel they are being led by business, like a Judas Horse leads a herd of wild horses, into a corral of debt.
I have had words with him over it. I believe he understands my concern, but also dismisses it as the unwarranted fear of an old half-senile scardeycat. His take seems to be that life should be enjoyed today when and while it can be enjoyed, and deal with Tomorrow's problems Tomorrow.
I have related to him my fear of waking up in the morning, having dozens of heads circling over me, each demanding payment I do not have, and trying to figure out what to do to make them go away, knowing I only have resources for one or two of them, and even that will only shut the head up for a month before its buzzing around again wanting its due. Those heads won't be nearly as nice as they were when they were presenting their papers and flourishing the pens for his signature. His take seems to be .... well, he got to use the resource for so many years... if they take it back, he can always get something else, maybe not as nice, but if its there, he's a fool not to take it. And the banks seem to be chasing him, wagging fistfuls of money in his face, if he will sign their notes. He's a sought after commodity. A young person with an expected lifetime of several more decades. I think he's being raped. But he seems to be enjoying it.
Ok, maybe I am just an old fuddy-duddy that not going along with the show, and we each have our own comfort zone. I will have to let it go at that. I am not in any position to control him, nor am I responsible for his getting into debt. Just a friendly concern, same I would have if I saw him fixing to pump diesel into his brand new SUV, which I know his is a gasser. I would attempt to keep him from doing it, even if he rebuffed me, but I would not force my beliefs on him, and would have to let him proceed if he wanted to, even though I *think* I know the consequences of doing such a thing. There is always the possibility that engine technologies have changed and the new engines will take it, contrary to all beliefs I have. My concept of "Flex-Fuel" may be full of shit. In that case, all I can do is get out of the way, and learn a thing or two.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:29AM
What's funny is that a lot of the stuff these people go into debt for makes them happy for five minutes and then they don't care anymore. You can enjoy life without being a debt slave, constantly wasting money on drugs (including alcohol), etc. So the 'live in the present' argument is total nonsense.
But it seems a lot of people have been indoctrinated by corporations into believing they need these shiny goodies, and they just don't have the critical thinking skills to resist the indoctrination. So, to a large extent, I feel no pity for the people who choose to become debt slaves when it was completely avoidable.
(Score: 2) by Revek on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:22PM
Trickled down to them.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants