Family Debt - Buying Habits
by: Jerry Price - Dec 1, 2005 - comment
“Since the first mini-warehouses appeared in the Southwest during the late 1960s, the roll-top metal doors of self-storage have spread from coast to coast like burger franchises. There are more than 32,000 of the facilities nationwide with almost 1.3 billion square feet of rentable space … Do-it-yourself warehousing is only part of it. A whole range of enterprises has sprung up to ease the tensions between clutter and anti-clutter. Professional organizers charge businesses and residents up to $75 an hour to clean out offices and bedrooms. Books like ‘Taming the Paper Tiger’ and ‘Confessions of an Organized Homemaker’ have become staples of the self-help section. Retailers like the Container Store and California Closets sell the apparatus of a systemized lifestyle. Rubbermaid, which didn’t get into the storage business until 1985, sells about 100 million containers of all sizes annually.
“‘The next frontier is under-bed storage,’ says Brian Kincaid, the company’s senior product manager for home organization … The stuff explosion has produced a peculiarly American profession—the personal organization consultant. The National Association of Professional Organizers counts more than 1,500 members.”
Excerpted from Jim Auchmutey, Our Overflowing Lives: Americans Have to Invent Ways to Get a Grip on All Their Stuff, Atlanta Journal Constitution, January 20, 2002
“Even though you’re overweight, have a lousy job, and are miserable in your relationship, you know how to make yourself feel empowered, don’t you? You know how to build your self-esteem. You know that the way to feel like a superhero is to buy the right things so you can feel great about yourself. You may be short and plump, but your sports car is always the right size. You might feel kind of threadbare on the inside of your soul, but your house is ornate—decorated with money you don’t have.
“You might be convinced that your friends are all secretly laughing at your failings (and maybe they are, tee-hee), but they won’t laugh when they see you pull up in your ultra-cool new Jag sporting your new Rolex (that you charged at 12 percent interest). They’ll think you’re the last word in chic.
“That’s just how life goes, isn’t it? I mean, no one really likes you—and you don’t even like yourself that much—if you don’t own the coolest stereo, the biggest flat-screen and the most elegant luggage. This is a material world, and you—to coin a phrase—are a material girl … or guy. You can’t expect to be liked for yourself—it’s what you own that determines your self-worth … and your worth in the eyes of others.”
Ben Stein, How to Ruin Your Financial Life (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, Inc., 2004), 24-25.
“Americans had gotten caught in what I called the cycle of work-and-spend, in which the compensation for longer hours was a rising material standard of living. People were accumulating stuff at an unprecedented rate. Demanding jobs and escalating debt in turn resulted in high levels of stress and enormous pressure on family life. Some tried to buy their way out of the time squeeze by contracting out more household services, jetting off for stress-busting vacations, or finding a massage therapist, strategies that themselves require greater and greater household income. Through the boom years of the nineties, as new wealth led to a dramatic upscaling of consumer norms, the pressures intensified. Luxury replaced comfort as the national aspiration, despite its affordability for only a fraction of the population. In my second book, The Overspent American, I catalogued these changes and identified the social trends driving them. Americans had come under strong imperatives to keep up with the escalating costs of basics, like health care and education, as well as luxuries, such as branded goods, bigger vehicles, and outlays for leisure and recreation. A trip to Disneyworld became an expensive, but urgent, social norm. Households spent more, saved less, and took on more debt. Meanwhile, commercialization proceeded apace as branding became ever more sophisticated, ads proliferated, and shopping turned into a 24/7 affair. The country was preoccupied with getting and spending.”
Juliet B. Schor, Born To Buy (New York: Scribner, 2004), 10-11.
“Prior to the late sixties bankers were among the most conservative people in our society. Before anyone could borrow for consumables such as food or clothes, or even for non-consumables such as cars and houses, his financial status was thoroughly reviewed, and formulas were applied to insure his borrowing stayed within his means to repay. That is not true today. The increasing demand to make more loans has widened the parameters of acceptable loans. It is now assumed that the borrowers will discipline themselves to repay what they borrow. Unfortunately, many young couples have no idea how to calculate what they can or cannot afford to pay.
“More than 60 percent of all first-time home loans require two salaries to make the payments. But since the vast majority of first-time home buyers are couples under thirty-five years old, the prospect of a baby’s disrupting their cash flow is almost a certainty. So they have built-in potential financial problems from the outset. Combine that with the use of second mortgages to help make the down payments and loans for refrigerators, lawn mowers, and curtains, and you can see why so many young couples end up in financial trouble.”
Larry Burkett, Debt-Free Living (Chicago: Moody Press, 1989), 75-76.
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