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I completely, 100%, understand and sympathize. I've been in a similar situation for a while. I love my parents. And not all of their current situation is entir

I completely, 100%, understand and sympathize. I've been in a similar situation for a while. I love my parents. And not all of their current situation is entirely, directly, their fault, but a lot of it is. They recently had a windfall, of sorts, a few months back. I was hoping that, considering the foreclosure threats, the destroyed credit, the really tough situation they've been in, they would finally see to it that the money was put to effective use. But, no. Instead, they settled a few bills, yes, but several thousands went to my brother, so that he could get a shiny new car that he couldn't afford. My brother works hard, and I love him too. But, he couldn't afford it. He didn't need exactly that one. There were lots of perfectly reliable options for $1,000 or less. Predictably, he's already behind on paying them back. Then tax time came, and that windfall suddenly added up to a huge payment back to the government -- money they, again, didn't have. Now they're selling one of the vehicles they have a loan on, at a loss, because they can't afford the monthly payments anymore. They'll still have to pay the difference, probably for around a year, and they'll be out of a vehicle in the meantime. None of this stopped my dad from picking up a really great deal on an antique car, though. It's maddening. It's definitely starting to put a rift in our relationship. I've tried helping, a lot. I made their car payments for a while (and in return got to drive it while mine was broken down, yet again). I've been paying their cell phone bills for around a year now, at least. Meanwhile, I've bootstrapped my own business, with no savings. I work on my truck constantly. My girlfriend and I live in a small place; we get by, but it's been very difficult sometimes. Gradually though, we're getting ahead, and without much in the way of help. Mostly, we work at it constantly, and try to make smart decisions money-wise. But my parents, and now my brother, do seem to feel very entitled. They would probably object to that, but if you listen to them, you hear things like, "I've worked hard all my life, I deserve this." Well, no. They worked hard all their life, but they squandered everything they ever made. Now their time has run out and they don't have any options left -- but still, it's someone else's fault that they're being forced to give up all this stuff. I think it's the Boomer Generation Problem: they were told, "work hard, and you can have whatever you want", and so many people believed it. It was supposed to encourage them to do something meaningful with themselves, but instead it encouraged them to compete with eachother over ever more extravagant displays of wealth -- all of which kept actually making them poorer. It's very sad, and I fear that not enough of my generation has really begun to realize this yet.

edw519 16y ago
Nice post, up until "I think it's the Boomer Generation Problem". Boomer here who got his first credit card at age 27, never bought a house without at least 20% down, never had a car payment, and never failed to pay a bill on time. Just like most people I know, regardless of age. This is not a matter of age or generation, but of character. No need to ruin a great post with a silly conclusion.
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  You're probably right. I would expect there to be exceptions, but after doing a little digging, I'm not finding anything to support the belief that a specific age range of individuals is suffering statistically higher foreclosure rates. I got to that conclusion after a couple too many anecdotes, but there're no numbers to back it up.
  - muhfuhkuh 16y ago
    You know, as much as I hate to be a bigot (and, as a minority in this country, believe me, stereotypes _hurt_), I have to agree with your generational assessments. Furthermore, I think it's both the boomers and the "echo boomers" (born 1980 to 1995) that are perpetrating this easy money fallacy. Though alot of people will say it started well before, I'll say it seriously accelerated starting with George W. Bush, and I'll tell you why. Even though W graduated from Yale and Harvard (and had a father who did the same and who was a paratrooper and CIA director then VP then Prez), he was still looked at as kind of the lovable fuck-up, the "guy you'd wanna have beers with", i.e., an everyman. Very little elitism in his manner or his folksy talk with put-on Southern accent (even though he was born and raised in Connecticut). Everything he did was done "by the gut," given little more than "hope and faith" before decisions were made. It seemed easy. The way he damned the terrorists before making a golf swing, the time he simply waved his hand and made stem cell research disappear in a fog of amoral haze, the way he magically made trillions "appear" for the Nation's tax cuts and stimulus checks, the way he funded wars without accounting for them in the general budget. It seemed like magical, heady times. We didn't even understand it, but we loved it. Even though 9/11 came and went under his administration, we didn't feel the true weight of it, because it was all put on credit. That's ALL we knew. Credit was the magic salve for all problems. Suze Orman even told everyone that the only way to build credit was to have credit cards (which, in hindsight is complete BS as evinced by tons of people like myself, who has a ~740 score having never had a credit card in my 35 years of life, and currently paying both a mortgage and a car loan, both at between 4-4.5% interest with 10% down). Most of us just didn't care. We were asking increasingly crazier and crazier questions like "about to file bk [bankruptcy], lien on house... would I qualify for a lease on a Hummer H3?" (I kid you not, that was on a messageboard that I was forwarded the link by a friend; unbelievable). But alot of people had similar situations. Suddenly people were driving cars that cost more than 2x their annual salary, and buying a home that was more than 10x the same and not even noticing that it wasn't completely outrageous to do so. When it all came CRASHING down on them and the banks came to collect after their drunken-sailor grace periods, everyone was already tapped out, rolling debt from credit cards and loans onto new cards and things like that that seem kinda commonplace now even though it's simply mindboggling if looked upon on an individual person-by-person basis. I've seen this with the boomer generation, I've seen this with their kids (the echoes or Y generation), but it just mostly kinda skipped Generation X, the 30-somethings. Don't ask me why, I'm not a close study of generational attitudes, but I do know what may have triggered it. For the boomers, it was W's spending ways; for Gen-Y, it was watching their boomer parents as well as Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, et al. spend like it would never end. And, they tried to keep up with their cultural peers. Hey, just a theory :D

edw519 16y ago

Nice post, up until "I think it's the Boomer Generation Problem". Boomer here who got his first credit card at age 27, never bought a house without at least 20% down, never had a car payment, and never failed to pay a bill on time. Just like most people I know, regardless of age. This is not a matter of age or generation, but of character. No need to ruin a great post with a silly conclusion.

thaumaturgy 16y ago
You're probably right. I would expect there to be exceptions, but after doing a little digging, I'm not finding anything to support the belief that a specific age range of individuals is suffering statistically higher foreclosure rates. I got to that conclusion after a couple too many anecdotes, but there're no numbers to back it up.
- muhfuhkuh 16y ago
  You know, as much as I hate to be a bigot (and, as a minority in this country, believe me, stereotypes _hurt_), I have to agree with your generational assessments. Furthermore, I think it's both the boomers and the "echo boomers" (born 1980 to 1995) that are perpetrating this easy money fallacy. Though alot of people will say it started well before, I'll say it seriously accelerated starting with George W. Bush, and I'll tell you why. Even though W graduated from Yale and Harvard (and had a father who did the same and who was a paratrooper and CIA director then VP then Prez), he was still looked at as kind of the lovable fuck-up, the "guy you'd wanna have beers with", i.e., an everyman. Very little elitism in his manner or his folksy talk with put-on Southern accent (even though he was born and raised in Connecticut). Everything he did was done "by the gut," given little more than "hope and faith" before decisions were made. It seemed easy. The way he damned the terrorists before making a golf swing, the time he simply waved his hand and made stem cell research disappear in a fog of amoral haze, the way he magically made trillions "appear" for the Nation's tax cuts and stimulus checks, the way he funded wars without accounting for them in the general budget. It seemed like magical, heady times. We didn't even understand it, but we loved it. Even though 9/11 came and went under his administration, we didn't feel the true weight of it, because it was all put on credit. That's ALL we knew. Credit was the magic salve for all problems. Suze Orman even told everyone that the only way to build credit was to have credit cards (which, in hindsight is complete BS as evinced by tons of people like myself, who has a ~740 score having never had a credit card in my 35 years of life, and currently paying both a mortgage and a car loan, both at between 4-4.5% interest with 10% down). Most of us just didn't care. We were asking increasingly crazier and crazier questions like "about to file bk [bankruptcy], lien on house... would I qualify for a lease on a Hummer H3?" (I kid you not, that was on a messageboard that I was forwarded the link by a friend; unbelievable). But alot of people had similar situations. Suddenly people were driving cars that cost more than 2x their annual salary, and buying a home that was more than 10x the same and not even noticing that it wasn't completely outrageous to do so. When it all came CRASHING down on them and the banks came to collect after their drunken-sailor grace periods, everyone was already tapped out, rolling debt from credit cards and loans onto new cards and things like that that seem kinda commonplace now even though it's simply mindboggling if looked upon on an individual person-by-person basis. I've seen this with the boomer generation, I've seen this with their kids (the echoes or Y generation), but it just mostly kinda skipped Generation X, the 30-somethings. Don't ask me why, I'm not a close study of generational attitudes, but I do know what may have triggered it. For the boomers, it was W's spending ways; for Gen-Y, it was watching their boomer parents as well as Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, et al. spend like it would never end. And, they tried to keep up with their cultural peers. Hey, just a theory :D