It’s Andy Rooney Time. What a bunch of crap.
The media is rubbish.
I read MSNBC and this headline/byline stood out to me: “$60,000 in debt, and nothing to show for it: Mary Uhazi is drowning in a sea of debt that she built up slowly over more than two decades of easy credit. But now she’s worried she won’t be able to pay it all off.”
Does anyone read that and boggle a bit? First of all, I have to laugh. This woman used credit for 20 years and accumulated $60,000. Okay, that is mind boggling but part of me accepts that this, while an extreme case, does happen and many people do find themselves swimming in credit card debt. The part that made me laugh was this: But now she’s worried she won’t be able to pay it all off.
Is it just me or does anyone else think she should have hit that point a long, long time ago? The article goes on to say: “Now she worries she won’t be able to pay it off because of the recession, which has led to a reduction in her salary and an increase in her credit card bills.”
Seriously? The recession has caused her to question if she’ll be able to pay of $60,000 in credit card debt?! I just have to laugh. People, the recession is not a catch-all excuse for the failures (human though they may be) of personal responsibility in spending. Even if her credit cards completely eliminated her interest rate and even if her state job’s income was not decreased due to furloughs…I’m thinking that Mary should have had some doubts long ago about her ability to pay off this mountain of debt. In fact, it would have been helpful if she’d had those reasonable thoughts before she incurred the debt.
This also caught my eye: “She’s thought about trying to get a second job in the evenings, but such jobs are hard to get these days, and she worries about taking a position away from someone else who has no other means of income.”
Am I reading this correctly? She just said: “I thought about trying …but it sounds hard. And, from the goodness of my heart, I don’t want to take the job away from someone else.”
And this: “Financial goals she once dreamed of, like buying her own home, have been put off indefinitely.”
Owning a home isn’t some *impossible* dream. You have to take steps to do it – and I suspect she never seriously looked into those steps because, at some point, she would have learned that having that much credit card debt was going to make her home owning dream that much more of a fantasy. I think her home buying dreams were probably put off $40,000 ago.
This reminds me of my first entry on the media – where some spammer sent pictures of women having sex with animals and the news group spent all this time and money tracking down the spammer. No, media, NO. You go find the woman having sex with these animals because 1) you have her picture and 2) people have more serious questions about her than some dude hitting the send button.
BAH.
Just a random attorney writing about daily life with Little Filthy, my rotten dog.
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:27 pm
I have $10,000 worth of CC debt I doubt I’m ever going to be able to pay off. The cards are all in collections because I haven’t paid on any of them since August. I haven’t had the cash
22 and looking into Bankruptcy ftw.
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:56 pm
It’s so hard, isn’t it? I can understand your situation. I hope my rant didn’t seem directed at you – the issue I took was that they wrote the story as if she woke up one day and thought, “Darn it, with this recession, I don’t think I’m gonna be able to pay off the $60,000. Darn that recession!”
I think that paying off credit card debt is a new rite of passage for many people. It’d hard a hell, isn’t it?
June 23rd, 2009 at 7:13 pm
DUDE. really? 60K in cc debt? WTF was she buying?
how is she gonna pay that off? two words: STREET WALKING.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:19 am
Here here!
My husband and I got hit hard by the recession (for reals) in January. We are only just making our comeback now – slowly but surely after selling property and the sheer luck of my man getting a job back in his trade after trying for months.
I like that we can say that because we always made good decisions before, during and will continue to after the recession’s effects are at their worst. We never squandered what we had or lived beyond our means. Our means just changed a little.
Some people annoy the eff out of me for using it as an excuse when some of us have been struggling for real!
June 25th, 2009 at 9:36 am
I am over $100k in debt in LAW SCHOOL LOANS.
However, I have $0 in credit card debt.
WHO AM I ALLOWED TO SHIFT MY BLAME TO?
July 4th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
I have two jobs, take care of an elderly grandmother, have to deal with celiac’s disease (and all the expensive drugs and doctor’s visits), and still manage to get my debts paid off and get a 4.0 each semester. And all of this during a recession that has caused my wages to get cut, my loan interest to jump astronomically, and gas prices to take a massive chunk out of my weekly pay.
Needless to say, I have ZERO sympathy for this silly woman. She ran up all of this fricking debt before the recession had even started, and then tries to use it as an excuse for not sorting her life out.
What you said: “Am I reading this correctly? She just said: “I thought about trying …but it sounds hard. And, from the goodness of my heart, I don’t want to take the job away from someone else.”” Is spot-on. I’ve heard this same b.s. excuse from a few of my acquaintances, and it always manages to make me feel like waving my arms in the air maniacally and shrieking like a banshee.