Debt that you can’t quite get in front of will make you a bit nihilistic - it took moving abroad to a country where the shops had limited hours and many of them

Debt that you can’t quite get in front of will make you a bit nihilistic - it took moving abroad to a country where the shops had limited hours and many of them didn’t take credit cards to help me reform. Oh, and dating (then marrying) a guy who was raised with a particularly strong version of that culture’s aversion to consumer debt (he couldn’t fathom borrowing money to buy a car). I speak of Germany, circa 20 years ago. Unfortunately, consumer credit of all sorts has become a lot more available and accepted here, and I’m worried for a lot of the people around me for when the looming global recession really gets going, and we see the full impact of Putin wrecking the energy order Germany had allowed itself to be lulled into - those higher energy bills won’t start showing up for a lot of folks before next year. But not my husband’s family, or us - we live small, in a culture that still doesn’t pressure us to live as large as US culture, especially my Texan culture, does people in our general walk of life.