This Old Coffee Maker
“My coffee maker is ancient and I would very much like to have a more modern one. This one seems very nice and I promise it will get a lot of use here. I can pick this up at your convenience. Thank you for your consideration.”
” I would absolutely LOVE to accept your coffee maker !!! I am disabled but my caregiver can pick it up when it is convenient for you. Can pick up at your house or your work place.”
“I would love to give this a new, permanent home!!! I can pick up at your convenience. This would also be very appreciated as I am on a fixed income due to some ongoing health issues, and haven’t had the extra money to buy a new one at the moment myself.”
This is just a small sample of the email responses I received after posting an old coffee maker on Freecycle. The “free” coffee maker I bought four years ago with a $40 Target gift card I’d received from my grandmother for a birthday present, which she’d gotten from a bank for opening a new account. The coffee maker I rolled my eyes and wanted to smash in the morning with its incessant I-am-done beeping sound. The coffee maker I swore burned my coffee no matter what temperature the little burner tray was set to.
That’s how I saw it, at least – right up until I read those Freecycle responses, which literally brought tears to my eyes. Up until then, I considered myself a grateful person – to the point that said gratitude can annoy Sweet Mans until he says “Stop acting like you’re still poor!” I was wrong: I’ve still been taking things for granted, and not just my coffee maker, but my not-yet-disabled status, my physical freedom, my good health, and my not-really-fixed income as well. I think of those things — my health, my independence — in the abstract, but those messages brought the gratitude home.
Tough Money Love recently wrote about building a better mood about your money. If you need a kick in the pants (and you may not even know you do), I recommend Freecycle.
Sick of Bail Outs?
For everyone but you? Me too.
Oh hey, how are your shares of Bear Stearns performing these days? You do own shares of Bear Stearns, don’t you? I only ask because, well, doesn’t everyone? You and I each paid for them with our tax money. So where are our shares?
Well, even if you somehow didn’t get the shares of Bear Stearns you paid for, surely you’ll have some Fannie Mae shares in your portfolio in the near future, right? Surely our portfolios won’t be forgotten in this next round of bail outs!
I’d better never hear the word “free market” in this country again. The Fed just won’t let the market do its job. Again and again the government intervenes in the market to rescue an entity that, as shown by its behaviors and outcomes, deserves to fail. Often enough, the entity fails anyway and you and I are left holding the tab.
United Airlines is a good example of this. After September 11, the Bush administration spent $15 billion in an airline bail out (that’s $15 billion for multiple airlines, not just United; I believe each airline received approximately $900 million). United filed for Chapter 11 anyway. U.S. Airways filed for bankruptcy the year before United did.
The government bail out after September 11 did not change what was going to happen; it only delayed the inevitable. United workers still lost their jobs (some before and during the bail out, some later). The bail out did not prevent bankruptcy and thus ensure that pensions would be paid. The bail out did not in any way improve airline service, which is worse now than it has been in my adult lifetime. We should not bail out corporations. Corporations need to be allowed to fail if they deserve to fail.
Do you honestly think we won’t have airplanes or airlines if some of them fail? No. We will still have airplanes to fly in, I promise. But you and I shouldn’t pay for a penny more than our tickets.
Why does the Fed seem to think shareholders, lenders, and creditors can’t, or shouldn’t, ever lose money? Losing money is a risk that shareholders, lenders, and creditors take every single time they invest, and they need to be allowed to lose money sometimes. When you own shares there is no guarantee that those shares will do well. I know that. I invest in stocks that I hope do well, knowing full well they might not. No one ever bails me out from the consequences of acceptable risk.
Let’s take Bear Stearns, because it’s a recent example in which we, the citizens and taxpayers that pay for our government’s very existence, were told that Bear Stearns had to be saved lest worse calamities befall us. I heard, like you, that there were supposedly terrible consequences to not bailing out Bear Stearns. The same is now being said of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
For some reason, though, I’m having a really hard time finding well founded, factual documentation of those supposedly terrible consequences. For a Ph.D. student who spends a lot of time doing research it’s a new and interesting problem to have.
Let’s start with the media. “Bear Stearns shareholders were nearly wiped out,” said the LA Times. So what? That’s the risk investors take. You win some, you lose some. So one of the always possible consequences of being a shareholder almost… happened. Uh, OK. Still not feeling the shock and awe here. Next “reason” please!
But then, this is the media. We didn’t expect much from them anyway.
Let’s forget the media altogether and look at the transcript of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s Senate testimony. Surely this will contain some good, solid, well established reasons for the Bear Stearns bail out. I mean, he IS talking to the Senate and he IS the guy who ultimately made this decision.
The first few paragraphs describe existing problems in the economy not related or specific to Bear Stearns. Bernanke mentions that sales of homes are down and mortgages are harder to come by. Again, this was all underway prior to anything happening to Bear Stearns. OK, it’s context setting if nothing else. Moving right along…
Bernanke goes on to talk about the Fed’s role in market interference, or, um “improving” the market. He says, “Well-functioning financial markets are essential for the efficacy of monetary policy and, indeed, for economic growth and stability. Consistent with its role as the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve has taken a number of steps in recent weeks to improve market liquidity and market functioning.”
Well, at least he acknowledges the Fed’s interference in the “free” market but all with the best intentions of fixing things. He lists what steps the Fed has taken and, in a few cases, explains why a particular step was taken (but certainly not at any detail that’s satisfying to me).
Bernanke gets to the Bear Stearns decision here: “To prevent a disorderly failure of Bear Stearns and the unpredictable but likely severe consequences for market functioning and the broader economy, the Federal Reserve, in close consultation with the Treasury Department, agreed to provide funding to Bear Stearns through JPMorgan Chase.”
This is worth spending some neurons on.
Bernanke tells us, first, that one reason to bail out Bear Stearns is “To prevent a disorderly failure of Bear Stearns.” Why is a “disorderly failure” particularly, as opposed to any other flavor of failure, bad? Why is “disorderly failure” in and of itself be a bad thing for anyone besides Bear Stearns shareholders (and, obviously, Bear Stearns employees who might lose their jobs)? The vast majority of U.S. citizens are neither shareholders nor employees of Bear Stearns, so I fail to see, at this point in Bernanke’s testimony, why the Fed and Treasury Department should consider saving them for this reason.
But let’s look at the second half of that statement, “the unpredictable but likely severe consequences for market functioning and the broader economy.” After reading this, I’m not confident that Chairman Bernanke knows the true consequences of not bailing out Bear Stearns. He doesn’t know what the consequences are because they are “unpredictable,” but somehow he can say with certainty that the unpredictable consequences will be “severe.” Magical. We don’t know what the consequences are, just how strong they will be. Got it. It’s also telling that “market functioning” precedes “broader economy” in sentence order. We know what is literally of first concern here.
This might sound naive, but you know what? I don’t believe you, Bernanke. I truly do not believe that anything bad would happen to me or the “broader economy” if you had allowed Bear Stearns to fail. I cannot believe that anyone would suffer besides the shareholders (who should always know they might lose money), Bear Stearns employees, and the people involved in markets somehow who are rich people, not the vast majority of American citizens. Most of us Americans pretty much just keep going on day to day, for the most part, and things don’t change all that much with market activity. How much does my daily life change with Dow activity? Not at all, frankly. If Bear Stearns fell over in the forest and I didn’t have to walk past news stands or forgot to turn on NPR, I would never know. I’m not buying it, Bernanke.
Apologies for the digression. Back to our man at Senate, Ben Bernanke: “Normally, the market sorts out which companies survive and which fail, and that is as it should be. However, the issues raised here extended well beyond the fate of one company.” All right, that stands to reason. If your company issued loans to Bear Stearns, for example, and they failed and couldn’t pay their loans, your company might be in trouble. Your company never should have put itself in a position in which one failure could take the mother ship out, though. Your bank deserves to fail too.
Then there’s more detail on this:
“Our financial system is extremely complex and interconnected, and Bear Stearns participated extensively in a range of critical markets. The sudden failure of Bear Stearns likely would have led to a chaotic unwinding of positions in those markets and could have severely shaken confidence. The company’s failure could also have cast doubt on the financial positions of some of Bear Stearns’ thousands of counterparties and perhaps of companies with similar businesses. Given the exceptional pressures on the global economy and financial system, the damage caused by a default by Bear Stearns could have been severe and extremely difficult to contain. Moreover, the adverse impact of a default would not have been confined to the financial system but would have been felt broadly in the real economy through its effects on asset values and credit availability.”
The first few sentences, if you read them carefully, still don’t tell us very much. What are these “critical markets” in which “Bear Stearns participated extensively” exactly, and further, why are they critical and to whom are they critical? Why, exactly, is a “chaotic unwinding of positions in those markets” a bad thing? Isn’t that precisely what happens in markets? Things change rapidly, “chaotically” sometimes even, and some people lose money and some people make money when “positions shift,” do they not?
As for “could have severely shaken confidence,” again I ask so what? I assume Bernanke means investor and/or consumer confidence and again I ask, so what? Consumer confidence was down before and after Bear Stearns, so it would be difficult to identify Bear Stearns as the CAUSE of falling consumer confidence. As for investor confidence, so what? If investors aren’t confident they don’t invest. I mean this seriously: If any of you can explain, concretely, why I should care about “shaken confidence” in Bear Stearns, please tell me. I am so eager to know.
Finally, Bernanke again borders on something that might interest most of us: “Moreover, the adverse impact of a default would not have been confined to the financial system but would have been felt broadly in the real economy through its effects on asset values and credit availability.”
There’s that “broad” term again without anything to back it up.
As for the rest, the “asset values and credit availability,” those were already going downhill before anything happened to Bear Stearns. As Bernanke himself notes earlier in his testimony (see the third paragraph), “Notably, in the housing market, sales of both new and existing homes have generally continued weak, partly as a result of the reduced availability of mortgage credit, and home prices have continued to fall.” Bernanke himself notes all of these things as already having happened.
From that statement I can only conclude that the non-investor focused reason to bail out Bear Stearns comes down to “less of more of the same.” That’s worth $29 billion? Really? To not fix things that had already happened and would continue to happen (though perhaps at a slightly different pace) regardless of what happened to Bear Stearns?
Since no one, including Bernanke himself in his own (or his trusty speech writer’s) words can tell me what the specific negative consequences of not bailing out Bear Stearns would be, beyond those NOT specific to Bear Stearns itself, I can only turn to the specific consequences to you and I.
You and I are worse off for bailing out Bear Stearns than for not. “Home prices have continued to fall,” as Bernanke said. There is still “reduced availability of mortgage credit.” “Asset values” are low and “credit availability” is tight and has not improved since the bail out, but has gotten worse. Anything that might make our lives better (i.e., the ability for you and I to obtain a line of credit to start a small business, perhaps) has not improved in any measurable way as a result of the $29 billion we handed over to Bear Stearns.
If nothing else, you and I paid taxes to already wealthy people instead of veterans or college students, or anyone or anything you care more about than Bear Stearns shareholders. For me it’s non-loan college scholarships, investments in rail transportation, and stopping global warming. You probably have your own list, which can include a gamma ray shield for all I care, but I bet you cared not a whit more for Bear Stearns than you do for gamma rays or Amtrak.
It’s cold comfort to remember that the the bail out to Bear Stearns is just a loan. Surely we’ve all learned by now that loans are not necessarily repaid. The Fed has essentially insured troubled securities. If those securities STILL end up completely worthless (and they absolutely can, there is no stopping that) then the Fed, and you and I, would be out the whole $29 billion. Under the terms of the deal the Fed made with JPMorgan, JPMorgan is only on the hook for the first $1 billion in losses. But who knows how much the losses might be? We, the citizens, will foot the bill for the rest while the corporation, JPMorgan, cruises happily along.
The bail out has only taken shareholder risk and moved it over the government, which we pay for.
And here we are again, today, with news of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Obviously the Bear Sterans bail out did nothing to prevent those problems (remember how Bernanke thought the bail out of could help prevent problems with similar businesses?). How many more bail outs will we give before we’re convinced they’re not working?
What do we have right now? Unemployment – was happening, still is. Inflation due to interest rate decisions – was happening, still is. Similar companies struggling and the Fed thinking of helping? Was happening, still is, you bet. So tell me again why we bothered?
Chicago on $100 a Day
Oh yes I did. Yes, that IS what I spent on five short days in sweet home Chicago. I’ll try to refrain from singing my ode to Chicago, now that I’m back in San Francisco and feeling sullen until I readjust to West Coast everything (which is really Not For Me).
I’ve gotten boring in the past year. I’d completely forgotten how to live a little and I needed a serious reminder. Fortunately my Chicago kinfolk set me right!
In San Francisco, for some reason I have yet to discover, I just AM NOT myself. I think this is because I just don’t like living here, plain and simple, and tend to think of my time here (unproductively, I admit) as time I’m wasting that I could be spent, much more happily, somewhere else – Kansas City, Louisville, Austin, Chicago, somewhere else. My dislike for San Francisco is difficult to articulate, but at its simplest I just don’t feel that San Francisco has the vim, vigor and verve of Chicago nor its populace the same willingness to have fun even if it means appearing less hip or god forbid embarrassing yourself, the same willingness to express instances of pure, non-ironic, non-kitschy, unbridled joy.
I’ve now been, for example, to six shows at the Fillmore where not a single person danced. They all just sort of stood and occasionally nodded their heads. To music that wasn’t slow. Maybe it’s the active and residual marijuana in that place but Lord almighty, in all my days in Chicago I never saw THAT. If you ever see that happen to me, haul me off, because it means I died inside.
How do you stop yourself from dancing? Give me Mucca Pazza and some Suavemente on the jukebox at the Chip Inn, or the Golden Horse Ranch Square Dance Band doing a square dance cover of ACDC’s Thunderstruck with dozens of drunk people spinning in circles, arms linked together, any damned day over being a hipster at the Fillmore.
Anyway – I spent $100 a day being happy happy happy back in Chicago, listening to Devin and the Straights and seeing gay cheerleaders and screaming along to Sixteen Candles Band (silly? You bet – and I loved every blessed minute) and drinking whiskey at the Hideout during Devil in a Woodpile and partied like I did not know I still could. I feel five years younger after five days away. This city’s killing me so I’m just going to keep going back to Chicago as often as I can.
Apparently I don’t spend money when I’m unhappy, in an attempt to make myself happy. No, I spend it when I’m crazy manic happy. I’ve been a great saver for months, with the emergency fund at $13,000+ and slouching towards $20k for the year. In Chicago, my friends, I was not about saving – no, this particular weekend was all about the living.
Granted, $150 of the $500 was for gift cards (all local businesses) for the two friends I stayed with for five days and four nights. Obviously, $150 total is significantly less expensive than a hotel and I sincerely appreciated their kindness. These friends recently bought their condo, and homeowners reading this know that the first year is always especially tight, so gift cards come in handy. These friends also spent their own gas money to come get me from the airport (to Midway from Andersonville and back) and made lamb for my farewell dinner. Gas and meat are pricey right now. If you think of it this way, $150 is not nearly enough for room, dinner, and gas.
I spent $50 on a fair-trade sundress made in India at the Andersonville Midsommarfest. The weather was hot and so what? I think I spent $20-$40 on brunch at the heavenly, free beignet, let-me-die-now-lest-bad-food-find-me-after-this-day Big Jones on Clark St.
If I may just take a moment for Big Jones… yes. I could die. It was that good. Breakfast is never getting better. I’ve had the best breakfast I will ever have and now all other breakfasts are ruined because they’re not breakfast at Big Jones. I even drank mimosas. Normally I’d be too frugal to drink mimosas but hell no, not at the lovely Big Jones during Midsommarfest with my beignets. If I ever have to choose a last meal it’s coming from Big Jones. Look out, M. Henry. Big Jones moved in down the street.
I also had some sangria. We all took turns buying alcohol for each other… aren’t we generous? I lost track of what I spent on alcohol – I think maybe $50? That’s the blessing of alcohol though, isn’t it? It’s just gone and you don’t know where and then you find $15 in the shorts you were wearing and it feels magical.
I gave $20 to Devin and the Straights for a CD and t-shirt but really just for being cute and inspiring my show-tunes-loving gay friends to chime in on the harmony parts (and yes, they sing harmony). Totally worth $20.
The rest was food and coffee. Oh did I love the food and coffee. My dear San Francisco, no matter where I go, you just don’t do food like NYC and Chicago (and New Orleans and Nashville). The Intelligentsia roasts, the Chicago-style Vienna Beef franks, the homemade lemonade, the Touhy Ave. bialys, the tamale cart lady behind my lovely condo that I want to be back in more than anything, the curry vegetables at the Heartland and the coffee at Kopi and the burgers at Hamburger Mary and the Paki cabbie food at Shan and the Giordano’s delivery and the margaritas at T’s and oh Chicago, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize it.
The moral of the story? If I still lived in Chicago I’d be broke AND fat AND happy.
Now I will, once again, begin to stash my money away in my San Francisco misery anew… at least until August 18, when next I fly east to that glass skyline of a gleaming city on the glacial lake, The Bean shimmering and the gravity tanks winking in that strange, warm, golden sunset light I’ve never seen anywhere else.
Waste Watchers
A few days ago, I wrote about how I got out of debt and some of the happy-accident side effects of that process (like absolutely deadened desire to spend money). What I call Waste Watching was another one: When I realized where I was wasting money, I became much more conscious of waste in general – garbage or paper packaging I didn’t need, for example. Once you’re watching monetary waste, other waste awareness isn’t far behind.
Just as I’d always considered myself frugal, I’d also considered myself green. Just like I had lots of room for improvement in the frugal department, so I had room for improvement in the green department. For example:
- When I calculated my Latte Factor, I also realized how many paper cups and plastic tops I wasted. My home brew is carried in a $3 stainless steel mug (probably made in a slave labor camp, I know) so this is a win in two ways.
- Same goes for eating lunch out. Unless you’re dining in, that carry out comes in a container, with wax paper wrappings and napkins in a paper bag. All those raw materials to accompany me for… five blocks. What a waste. Fortunately, some carry out comes in compostable containers like those from Michigan Green Safe. The only catch is you actually have to… compost them.
- We signed up with 41pounds.org. When you’re trying to get out of debt, junk mail brings catalogs containing lots of luxe you just don’t need. The spring sweaters from J.Crew in Wizard-of-Oz technicolor, the cough-drop polished-pebble looking Crate & Barrel bowls – you don’t need that in your face when you’re $10k under, no way! It’s also a huge waste of paper. I can testify that 41pounds.org has worked wonders at our house and highly recommend it.
- I’m a compost freak now. I see the tops of strawberries, for example, and get kind of giddy because I can add them to the compost. San Francisco makes it easy on us because they pick up compost with the trash, but it’s not too difficult to compost at home. I swear up and down, between recycling and compost we throw out one bag of garbage every 3-4 weeks now.
If I may, a brief diversion on composting…
Right now, identifying another item suitable for the compost bin is like the feeling you get when you use a double coupon or get something you want and actually use for free – that feeling like you’re winning a challenge? The challenge is “How little garbage can we create?” because hey, when you’re out of debt you’ve got to have a new challenge waiting! I think Man might leave me if I don’t stop pointing at paper towels and pistachio shells and saying only “Compost!” It’s getting pretty bad but, oh well – debt is worse!
Debt Culture
This is an absolute must-read article by Jim Jubak: U.S. Deep in Debt and Still Digging. This is one of those articles I rely on when I need a succinct, clear way to explain how it is that you and I come to pay thousands of dollars for government debt. Most people truly don’t understand that we pay for this, or how much; as Jim Jubak spells it out, “The taxes you paid on your recently filed 1040 included roughly $4,300 to cover your household’s annual share of the interest payments on the $9.4 trillion in public debt owed by the U.S. government.”
That’s just the interest. In case you missed that. Just the interest… on debt you did not willingly incur! For stuff you didn’t get to enjoy or choose to buy! Think, for a moment, of how much better off you’d be if you had that $4,300 to put toward your OWN debt. Note to CPA: Is there anything we can do about this?
Jubak also includes a little nugget about why it’s important to think about the origin of the products you buy: “That $9.4 trillion is just part of what we as a nation owe collectively. There’s also the $700 billion trade deficit we ran up in 2007 as a result of importing more than we exported.”
A much darker, doomsday commentary on the cultural shift we need to make away from consumption is here: What a Way to Go, a movie. I encourage you to be critical about the presentation and message, but also open minded. As we should be with all messages others try to use to influence us!
In brighter news, I haven’t bought anything in two days (yesterday and today, and today is pay day). I love that feeling.
Our usual toothpaste was $2 off per box on Sunday. I had a financial geek moment in the Walgreen’s. You know, that insane joker-like grin you get when you find something you really love and normally buy at full price with a major markdown? And you’re happy because you’re not compromising at all and buying the cheaper brand you hate instead? Yeah. I bought three, which is all that Tiny But Inexpensive Apartment has room for right now.
I’ve also started using the library again. With online renewals and this LINK + fanciness (in which the book I want, if found anywhere in the California Republic, essentially, is sent to the local branch of my choosing), I have no excuses. This is another case where frugal is greener: I read most books once. To spend the money on them, to say nothing of the raw materials (trees) used to make the books and the Amazon boxes they’re shipped in, and never mind the fuel used to ship them here, well, it’s a travesty. I need to get in the library habit for a lot of reasons.
Values
I’ve got to let this Suze-style rant of incredulity out. This would be a “my two cents” type of post. Technically, this story is none of my business, or yours for that matter, but someone told me about it and I didn’t ask. It contains what I think are some good financial lessons and illustrations of the values that, I’m sad to say, were and perhaps still are normal in the area in which I was raised.
I grew up in Detroit down the street from Joe, Jane, and their two children, Mary and John. Mary is my age, John is my younger brother’s age. We all went to elementary school together and walked to school every day, etc.
My mom is still in touch with Jane, so we’ve heard about how John, Jane’s son, recently lost his house in foreclosure. He, like so many others in Michigan, was unemployed for more than a year. He worked in construction, the housing market tanked, and not a whole lot was getting built anymore. John, his wife, and brand new baby have had to move in with her parents in an extremely rural area, a very long drive from any area with jobs (and Michigan doesn’t have a lot of those anyway right now). My initial response was the usual “What the hell are you doing having a baby NOW?” They’re 26, time is still on their side. But who am I to say, and that baby’s here now.
Still, I felt badly for John… until the following facts came out.
- John’s father co-signed a mortgage that John and his wife couldn’t qualify for on their own. No one involved seemed to think this was a sign that maybe, just maybe, John and his wife couldn’t afford, shouldn’t have, and weren’t ready for a house. Dad co-signed away. Sometimes, when you think you’re helping your kids, you’re not.
- Dad was subsequently surprised when John couldn’t afford to pay the mortgage, so Dad started making payments that ended up totaling $10,000.
- John lost his job. He received unemployment for six months but was out of work for a year. Because John was house poor, throwing everything he could at the mortgage and still not being able to afford it, he had no savings. I mentioned he had a wife and a baby to care for, right?
- When John was unemployed, and able to care for the baby all day, his wife did not so much as look for a job. Great. Real way to be a team. It’s not as if the baby would be without a parent, he would have just been with a different parent while SOMEONE worked. Still, working at all was unacceptable to her.
- They lost the house in foreclosure, finally. There’s a lot of credit card debt; bankruptcy is on the table.
- Fortunately, John finally found some work with health benefits, about a month ago.
- They still can’t afford to live on their own, so they’re living with John’s MIL for free. They are not contributing toward rent because MIL wants them to save money to get back on their feet. This makes sense. In addition, MIL’s house is in a rural area so the gas costs for John’s commute are not inconsequential.
- MIL has offered to watch the baby all day (she’s retired but in perfect health and pretty young, in her mid-50s, totally capable of this task) so her daughter can go to work. No, says the daughter, I don’t want to. In this case, I think her mom needs to say “Then you can NOT WORK in your OWN HOUSE” but I digress. Or she can trot out the “This house is not a democracy” my dad was so fond of.
- But the icing on the cake is that my grandparents, also knowing of this trouble, heard John and his wife need a new car and offered to practically give them one of theirs. I mean, for thousands of dollars less than they would have been able to sell it for, because they’re all right financially and they want to help. This is just how my wonderful grandparents are. They also made up odd jobs for John to do while he was unemployed so they could give him money in a socially acceptable way.
- So what does John say to the offer of the car? Wait for it… “Oh thanks but we’re buying a brand new SUV.”
And this perfectly displays the Michigan mentality I recognize so well from my home town. You may not have a job. You may not have a house and thus no drive way to park a car in. You may have debt up to your ears. You may not be able to afford your own housing, your own savings, or any savings for your child. But dag nabbit, you’ve got a really nice car that guzzles even more of that gas that now costs close to $3 gallon.
This is what it was like on my street on the northeast side of Detroit. Tiny houses, roof needs replacement, house needs a paint job, lawn’s a mess, but damn that’s a nice car in the driveway! I’ve got My Ride.
And no, no one in John’s family still has a job at a Detroit automaker that gets them any kind of discount.
I make $110,000 a year and I could not comfortably afford an SUV payment, insurance, and gas AND my housing and putting what I should be in savings, as well as emergency savings for my periodically laid-off autoworker father. But John can afford it, right? Does it matter?
