What should come in the mail today but a notice that, o lucky me, I soon will be receiving a shiny new gold-plated MasterCard to replace my ancient Sears credit card, which I thought I’d canceled years ago.
Huh. “Your new card gives you MORE!”
Oh boyoboyoboy!
“Earn Rewards Points!… …with FREE membership in Sears Choice Rewards when you call 1-800-669-8488 and enroll by 10/31/09″
“Plus Earn Up To 1,500 Bonus Points!!!!!”
Be still, my heart. I can hardly contain my excitement.
At first I thought this thing is a straight-out replacement for the Sears card, which materialized some time back when I bought some appliances on one of those 12-month no-interest deals. If you have the cash to pay upfront, these offers can be played to your benefit: you just set the money aside a high-interest online bank account or into your credit union’s highest-paying account or 9-month CD. Then in the 11th month, you pay off the debt in full. Allows you to earn a few dollars on the float. Makes you feel smug.
However, a study of the fine print reveals that you don’t lose your regular Sears charge account unless you call an 800 number and have the MasterCard activated. If you do nothing, well then…nothing happens. The Sears card does not go away, and the MasterCard does not function. But if you don’t want them to send you an unsolicited credit card, the better to expose you to identity theft, then you have to waste some time navigating their punch-a-button maze to call and tell them to knock it off.
Well, I thought I’d closed that Sears account. Dug up the old, dusty file folder and found…nay. The last time they sent me a shiny new blue Sears charge card, I just dropped it in the folder and forgot it. The sticker with the phone number to activate it is still stuck to the front of the card.
I carry two cards in my wallet because some establishments refuse to pay American Express’s exorbitant merchant’s fees. That notwithstanding, I use AMEX because a) Costco won’t take any other card at its gas pumps and b) it gives me a $250 to $500 kickback once a year. Since I don’t carry cash, I need a back-up card if I’m to do business with retailers and service providers who won’t accept AMEX. That feels like one card too many for me: given my choice, I’d use only one card. So I absolutely positively do not need a MasterCard with a Sears logo on it.
This fine offer came in a first-class envelope labeled “credit-card replacement information—open immediately.” What it really is is issuance of an unsolicited credit card. I did not ask for this card, whose interest rate can go as high as 29.99%, and I don’t want it. Nor do I appreciate having to waste my time in their punch-a-button maze to get rid of the thing.
Didn’t they make that illegal?
If you’re a Sears customer, watch for this coming your way. And if you already have a perfectly fine general-purpose credit card, ask yourself why you need another one. If the answer is “I don’t,” note that you have to call them to “opt out” of this unsolicited gift.
With the advent of more and more good movies and British television shows to watch over the Internet—and the steady loss of good things to watch on my television—I moved a moderately comfortable Eames-style chair out of the TV room into my office. There, I could push my desk chair aside and pull up the Danish lounger to luxuriate in front of some of the wonderful performances to be had by computer. This left a big, gaping hole in the TV room’s decor. So, I decided I should try to purchase an inexpensive chair for that spot. No one ever sits there, so it doesn’t have to be especially comfortable, but it shouldn’t be too ugly.
I’d spotted a dowdy but more or less acceptable chair at a store that bills itself as an antique mall but really is a collection of second-hand furniture dealers’ booths. I don’t remember what the style is called—I always used to think of it as “ranch furniture,” because you’d see it on ranches and even in the dorm rooms at the University of Arizona: the chair consisted of a wooden frame with wide, flat armrests big enough to set a can of beer on; upholstery was a seat cushion and a back cushion. Although they can be surprisingly comfortable, this one wasn’t, and while the fabric on the cushions was in excellent condition, it was truly hideous and would have to be replaced.
But I can make cushions and could certainly have built new covers for those. Though the dealer wanted $175 for the chair, I figured I could push it down to around $150.
Still: it wasn’t a very pretty chair, and if I hired an upholsterer to recover the cushions, I could end up paying another hundred bucks or more for the final product.
A notice came in the mail from Crate and Barrel, advertising a 50 percent off sale. Hot dang! On the first day—Thursday, I think it was—I shot out to Scottsdale like a rocket. Hope springs eternal in the consumer’s breast…
Well, if Crate and Barrel was selling anything at a 50 percent mark-down, I sure didn’t see it. They had one piece marked off 40 percent…the sort of thing that goes on sale for a reason, the reason being no one in their right mind would want to own it. Otherwise, the deepest discount was around 20 percent. The two chairs that would have done the trick in the TV room were well beyond my price range.
While I was there, though, naturally I had to wander through the houseware department. There I found…ta DAAA! These excruciatingly nifty Polish glass items.
They reminded me of my wonderful Polish sister-in-law, who once gave me a glass sugar and creamer set that looked very much like the one here—a little more modern and stylish but very similar. To my dismay, I broke the creamer a few years ago. I always regretted not getting to know my former sister-in-law better: she and I had much in common other than the brothers we married. She lived on the East Coast and then later in Texas, and the distance made it hard for us to stay in touch.
So, with this purchase in hand I drove back into town and revisited the junk antique store, planning to buy the wooden chair. Boy, those cushions were ugggg-leeeee! Each was an off-size, too: no chance of buying cushions somewhere else to wriggle out of having to make new ones. And the chair’s joints were loose: it needed to be taken apart and reglued. This thing was beginning to look like a large project, and one that could run up the price considerably.
Pier One has some cool furniture. Most of their chairs are sterling uncomfortable, but comfiness was not a high priority for this decorator item. Besides, it occurred to me that I might get one of their wicker or fake-wicker outdoor chairs, some of which have real panache and actually are more comfortable than their interior furniture. So, before making a final decision about the $175 second-hand masterpiece, it was back across the city to the nearest Pier One outlet.
Their latest sales ploy is to have an employee accost you the instant you walk in the door, eagerly offering to follow you around the store and direct you to the many things you surely will want to buy there. I hate that. So I had to tell the manager, who was the accoster of choice that day, to leave me alone, thank you.
I found several patio chairs, any one of which would do the job. The one I liked was selling for around $125, but of course you had to pay extra for the seat cushion. The ones they had on the chairs in the store were sterling hideous (have you noticed lamps and upholstery fabrics all seem to be done by graduates of The School for Ugly Design?), and the only cushion I liked didn’t fit the chair.
They did, however, have a couple of wicker indoor chairs that were reasonably priced and very nifty-looking. The jazziest of these was one of the most breathtakingly uncomfortable things you would hope never to sit in. But another, given the right cushions, was pretty tolerable. If guests came over, I could sit in the Pier One chair and let my friends have the better seating. Unlike the seat cushions, Pier One’s throw pillows are to die for! It’s hard to resist coming out of that place with an armful of the things. Soooo…. This was the result:
The wicker looks almost black in this image; it’s actually a dark brown. Overall cost, with the chair and three fancy pillows plus 8.3 percent tax: $334. More than I wanted to spend, but a heckuva lot better than the $1,266 Crate and Barrel wanted for the best of its offerings. I figure I probably would have ended up spending pretty close to fifty bucks on upholstery fabric to rebuild the second-hand chair’s cushions. And regluing the joints…who knows how many hours of my time? Actually, that job might have been beyond my skills, so I would’ve had to hire a handyman to do it: two hours of Greg’s son’s $30/hour time: another sixty bucks.
$175 + $50 + $60 = $285, plus the cost of my time and hassle
So though I didn’t get a bargain, I don’t feel I did that badly, either. Not bad at all. Forty-nine dollars for to save four or five hours of my $60/hour time devoted to repairing and upgrading the junk vintage chair? I’ll take it.
Okay, so we’re all sitting in this auditorium jam-packed with furloughed Great Desert University employees, listening to the HR people and a couple of gurus from Department of Economic Security telling us how we can access the unemployment insurance that is supposed to cover the twice-monthly furlough days.
At one point, the DES guy says, “You’ll get a debit card, and your benefits will be deposited to this debit card.”
A groan rises from the audience and fills the hall.
“Oh, I guess you don’t care for debit cards?”
No joke, says someone.
So, can we ask to have a check sent to us or to get direct deposit? someone else asks.
“Yes,” he says, “you can ask for direct deposit by going to the Web site, downloading a form, filling it out, and sending to DES along with a canceled check. But the first payment defaults to the Chase debit card, and there’s nothing we can do about that.”
We will, we’re given to understand, either have to spend the money on the debit card at retailers or go to an ATM or the bank and ask to have it in cash. But, we’re told, we must be careful, because Chase has a number of gotchas, and will charge fees for any number of arcane reasons. Read the paperwork that comes with it carefully.
Ducky.
I filled in the forms to claim unemployment, and within a couple of weeks a debit card arrived. At first, it developed, no money was on it because DES sent the cards out before they even got the data on ASU’s employees; since the agency is not online, it would take several weeks to manually keyboard information on several thousand furloughed employees. Eventually, enough time passed that I started to see the requested direct deposits appear in my checking account, so I figured the initial deposit must be there; all I wanted to do was retrieve it and move it into savings, there to wait for the day in December when I will be canned.
After several frustrating tries, I finally gave up. It simply would not disgorge the money, and no one at two different branches knew why or what to do about it.
So, I mailed the damn thing to DES and asked them to return whatever money they’d put on the card to the federal government, to whom it belonged.
LOL!
Weeks later, along comes this message from an assistant director at that august agency:
The week ending February 7, 2009 was your mandatory, nonpaid waiting week. Your next Shared Work week was the week ending February 21, 2009; this was the first paying week of your Shared Work benefits. Because your employer’s certification for that week [was?] on March 16, 2009, the order to move your benefit payments from your debit card to your bank account had already taken place on March 9, 2009. [Is there logic here? Where?] The benefit payment was not made to your debit card, but to your bank account on March 17, 2009. The reason your Chase debit card could not pay your $48.00 is because no funds were ever put into that account.
Reason is because…oh, God, I hope you were never in one of my required writing classes…
That distraction aside, why on earth did DES tell us that the first payment would default to the debit card, no matter what, no questions asked, no rebellion brooked? But then…what on earth does this person’s message mean, anyway: GDU asked that I be paid on March 16, and so DES paid me on March 9? Hey: who needs to be online when you’ve got a crystal ball?
WhatEVER. Apparently giving away the debit card was giving away nothing.
As the weather hotted up, I pulled out the last of the garden beets. There weren’t many, since a few had already gone to seed, turning their red tubers fibrous and woody. I wanted to use them in a particularly delicious salad from Julia Child. The basic recipe goes like this:
You need:
• 2 cups cooked rice • 2 cups diced cooked or canned beets • 4 Tbsp finely chopped green onion • 3/4 cup vinaigrette (recipe below; you can use a good bottled vinegar & oil-style salad dressing) • 1 1/2 or 2 cups mayonnaise (bottled or home-made; recipe below) • fresh or dried herbs, such as tarragon, marjoram, basil, thyme, summer savory, etc. • salt and pepper to taste • 1 cup of cooked vegetables, such as peas, green beans, cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, asparagus; you also can add such things as diced raw apple, grated raw carrots, cut-up cooked beef, pork, poultry, or fish, canned tuna or salmon. I defrosted some mixed frozen veggies for my version. • garnish such as olives, anchovies, sliced hard-boiled egs, watercress, or parsley
In a good-sized bowl, toss the cooked beets, onions, and rice together with the vinaigrette. Allow this combination to marinate for awhile in the refrigerator. Meanwhile, make mayonnaise and add a handful of chopped fresh herbs or a tablespoon or so of dried herbs. If you’re using bottle mayo, add the herbs to the mayo in the course of the next step.
Shortly before serving, add the rest of the ingredients to the beets and rice, and then fold in the mayonnaise. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Garnish as desired with one or more of the suggested condiments.
I didn’t have enough beets, and so I decided to add a can of cannellini beans to the rice-and-beet mixture. The result worked wonderfully: beans absorb vinaigrette with every bit as much enthusiasm as rice does.
Here’s how to make enough vinaigrette for this recipe:
You need:
• a measuring cup, at least 1 cup capacity • 1/4 cup lemon juice or wine vinegar • enough olive oil to fill the measuring cup to the 3/4 cup line • a clove of garlic, minced • salt and pepper to taste • maybe a dash of dried herbs—fines herbes or herbes de Provence work nicely
Combine the ingredients and whip with a fork to mix thoroughly. Pour this over the warm rice and beet mixture and fold together well.
And here’s how to make mayo in a blender…lo! Mayonnaise that actually tastes like REAL MAYO!
You need:
• an egg • 1 tsp Dijon-style mustard • 1/2 tsp salt • 2 Tbsp lemon juice or vinegar • 1 cup olive oil, or 1/2 cup olive oil and 1/2 cup mild salad oil
If you’re using two kinds of oil, combine them in your measuring cup. Notice that real mayonnaise doesn’t contain sugar. I don’t think bottled mayo did, either, when I was a kid. I never could stand that sicky-sweet Miracle Whip gunk, but now even Best Foods (Hellman’s in the East) is full of sugar. I guess they must have been forced to add it to compete with Miracle Whip, what with America’s sweet tooth so carefully cultivated by the foodoid industry.
Break the whole egg into the blender jar. Add the salt and lemon juice. Cover the blender jar with thelid (!!) and puree the ingredients at full blast for about 30 seconds. The egg mixture should be thick and foamy. Now, with the blender buzzing away, uncover the jar (most lids have a capped opening that you can undo for this purpose) and dribble in the oil in a thin stream of droplets.
The mayo will get thicker and thicker. If it gets too thick to absorb all the oil, add a few drops of lemon juice or vinegar.
For this recipe, you want to add lots of green herbs to the mayo. I add them just before the sauce is finished, before it gets very thick, just to keep things relatively simple. For the salade, I used a handful or so of fresh garden herbs…out in the backyard, I found thyme, marjoram, basil, and tarragon.
Because so few beets were available, this week’s version was not as colorful as a real salade à la d’Argenson is supposed to be. If you follow Julia’s recipe, the result is a brilliant purple-red. I find it very appealing, and it is delicious. But you should be aware that some people either don’t care for beets or think the Day-Glo magenta comes from food coloring, and they won’t touch it. I’ve taken this salad to first to a church social and later to a potluck gathering of people whose tastes I thought would be more urbane, only to come home with a whole bowl of uneaten salad…so, don’t try to feed it to strangers! 😉
I’d stopped secreting a copyright notice in the body copy of my posts, because the splogging of my site had slowed down enough to make that not worth the trouble. Besides, most of these chuckleheads simply steal the first few words and then insert a link back to my site, which tends to up one’s page rank, stupidly enough.
But here’s a real, unvarnished word thief: http://johnjtarthur.net
This low-life is stealing my articles and publishing them as his own, amid garlands of advertising. It’s now more than just a matter of principle: he’s stealing revenue that I sorely need because of the coming layoff.
Will you please go to this site right here and enter a complaint about the thefts shown at these URLs:
On some of these, he’s contrived to make the pingbacks go to older posts that have nothing to do with the post he stole, so obviously he knows he’s violating my copyright and AdSense policy and is trying to hide it.
When you get to the AdSense support site, click on “Report a Policy Violation.” Then follow the steps. Enter the johntarther.net homepage URL where it asks for the name of the offending site, and then copy & paste the URLs of the post he stole from Funny about Money and put those into the box to report the specific offense.
If you would like to report the specific FaM pages he has ripped off, they are as follows:
Thanks for your help. AdSense may send you a reply saying you have to jump through other hoops, but I’ve been told that Google actually will act on complaints sent through their report-a-violation site without correspondents having to take further action.
As McArdle puts it, people who declare serial bankruptcy “have very different financial profiles from the average American—less savings, more debt. When an adverse event occurs, they have no margin for error.”
It’s hard to argue with this logic. While there’s no question that some people fall into the financial tar pits through no fault of their own—catastrophic health problems in a country that provides little or no reliable health care coverage being a major cause—I’ve known several people who have brought themselves to the brink of homelessness. By and large they do it with behavior that is overtly self-destructive, so much so one wonders if it’s a strategy to attract attention and sympathy.
Some people see the profligacy allegedly modeled by Andrews’s wife, Patty Barreiro, as a moral failing. I don’t think so. In my experience, it’s a pathology: a mental illness that needs to be treated with therapy and medication. If you look at the way the sufferers behave, you see a pattern, one they seem to be unaware of:
• a series of self-destructive decisions; • self-destructive behavior that continues for years; • inability to recognize or pull out of self-destructive behavior; • inability to distinguish between self-indulgence and practical need; • a tendency to set up scenarios that naturally lead to one’s own victimization; • a flair for choreographing real-life melodrama; • appeals for sympathy and help to family and friends, often centering on a specific “target” individual.
Living beyond one’s means is self-destructive; it naturally leads to financial melt-down. Self-destructive behavior is pathological behavior: it’s a symptom of mental illness, not a moral failing. People who experience serial bankruptcies are telling us they’re suffering from mental disorder.
One woman I’m thinking of exhibits an extravagant pattern of feckless financial behavior. When you look at the bigger picture of her life, though, you realize that her financial irresponsibility is part of an even larger pattern of consistent self-destructiveness.
• In her twenties, she marries the scion of a wealthy family. He appears, on the surface, to be a good choice, until you learn that he was thrown out of some expensive private schools for his wild behavior and drug abuse.
• She stays married to him despite his recreational cocaine use.
• She remains with him after he proposes that they engage in a f**k-fest with a group of swingers, which he thinks might be titillating.
• They charge up vast amounts on credit cards, much of it covered by his parents, who each transfer the $10,000 a year to their son and daughter-in-law, adding $40,000 a year to the son’s teaching salary. This makes the two appear to be more affluent than they are; they do not save the money—they spend it.
• When she begins to speak of leaving him, their home is vandalized and utterly destroyed. Their insurance company pays to gut out the interior and rebuild it, as well as replacing all the clothing and furnishing that were destroyed in the attack. Terrorized, she cleaves to her husband and drops all talk of divorce.
• Over time, she grows more unhappy in the marriage and again begins to mouth it around that she is going to leave him. This time she is kidnapped by a group of thugs, driven into the desert, tortured and terrorized. They cut off her ear, torch her car, and chase her into the bush.
• Although the police state they suspect the husband of complicity in this attack, she denies it and flees back to his arms.
• His father buys her a new car and also goes in with her husband to purchase an outrageously expensive house, far beyond the couple’s means.
• Despite increasingly bitter and dangerous marital discord, she begins to have children by her husband. She accuses him of raping her but remains with him.
• After the second baby is born, the husband states unequivocally that he wants to stop having children. She wants another child. So, she lies to him, telling him she’s on the pill, and deliberately gets pregnant again.
• Furious, the husband rejects the third child, refusing to have anything to do with his second son. She stays in the marriage despite increasingly abusive treatment and constant discord.
• The husband takes the two favored children on a spring-break student trip he is supervising for his school. While he is gone, an arsonist breaks into the expensive home as the young woman sleeps with the toddler in her bed with her. He douses most of the house with gasoline, sets up gasoline bombs in the hallway outside the bedrooms, and torches the place. She and the child escape through French doors in the bedroom. The house is a total loss.
• Despite the unprovable suspicion that the husband had something to do with this second assault and evident attempt to kill her and his unwanted offspring, she remains in the marriage. The insurer rebuilds the house and then cancels the couple’s coverage.
• As time passes, the old man becomes disenchanted with the son’s irresponsible behavior and conceives a violent dislike for the young woman; he cuts them off, leaving them with enormous house payments.
• She finishes a degree in nursing, and so the two manage to cover the house payments on their combined salary—just. They continue to spend well beyond their means, racking up thousands on credit cards. They never seem to think of selling the house, which before the bubble was worth well over $600,000; when this is suggested to her, she insists they need the space for their three children.
• By now the two hate each other but stubbornly remain together.
• He installs a camera in one of the home’s showers, with which he videotapes the couple’s teen-aged babysitter in the nude. She finds the tape and confronts him, but still remains in the marriage.
• She announces she has kidney cancer and says she is being treated for it in another city. She goes through an elaborate charade that includes cutting off her hair and claiming to undergo chemotherapy and radiation therapy, to which she commutes by automobile. Amazingly, those closest to her seem to buy this story, even though she’s climbing mountains in a local desert park. Not until her sister comes into town, summoned to say goodbye to her, does the whistle get blown: the sister, who has worked for years in medical offices and herself is training to be a nurse, tells their father that there’s no way the woman has cancer. Subsequently, she undergoes a miraculous remission.
• She picks up a sh*thead in a bar and begins a passionate affair, going so far as to move her bed into the guy’s house. Still, she makes no move to divorce the husband and continues to live in their house.
• She gets pregnant by the boyfriend. This man has shown no inclination to support his other illegitimate child, and he now takes up with another woman.
• She refuses to terminate the pregnancy. She returns to the husband and demands that he support her paramour’s child.
• They continue to spend money on expensive vacations and vehicles. Behind her husband’s back, she buys a Toyota Sienna (a $30,000 van), financing it on the strength of her own salary.
• They declare bankruptcy. They do this minutes after the law is changed in favor of creditors. As a result, they are forced to sell the house.
• That notwithstanding, after the proceedings end the first thing they do is spend three weeks vacationing in San Diego!
• When they finally divorce, they go at each other tooth and nail. He, of course, has bottomless pockets—the old man is now dead; the widowed mother is wealthy in her own right and finances the most high-powered lawyers in town. They make a project of destroying the young woman. She fights back, hiring her own high-powered lawyers, who abandon her when she runs out of borrowing power to pay their fees.
• The issue of the illicit filming of nubile young girls comes up in court; through the machinations of her lawyers, it is brought to the attention of the school board, so that the husband is fired from his high-school teaching job. Now the kids have no health insurance. She is forced to take a salaried nursing job to obtain health insurance, leaving her higher-paid contract nursing work.
• She rents a series of amazingly expensive houses, one of them on an artificial lake, each of which costs well over $2,000 a month. When advised that she needs to seek more modest housing, she insists that she needs lots of room to accommodate the four kids. She is evicted from these, one by one. She buys a car, which is repossessed when she defaults on the payments; to take the car, the repo man breaks down the garage door at the rental house where she’s living.
• When advised to raise some cash by selling some of the piles of stuff she has accrued, she refuses to do so.
• Her eldest son, now a young teenager, accuses his father of sexually abusing him. He walks from his home to a nearby police station to report this. Because of the rancor involved in the divorce, however, his accusation is disbelieved by the court, despite the fact that a prior judge had formally ordered the father to desist from his habit of sleeping in the children’s beds.
• She fails to file income tax returns. She claims she thought her husband was filing; in the last year of their marriage, he filed separately. She says she did not know he had done so. That notwithstanding, in following years she continues to file no income tax statements. The IRS inquires.
• As her credit rating drops into the sub-basement, she is forced to rent from a fly-by-night landlord who buys junk houses and rents them, unmaintained. She engages him in a fight over the decrepit structure. In the course of photographing some substandard thing she wants fixed, she steps out onto a second-floor balcony, camera in hand. The rotted balcony gives way under her weight. She falls through the floor to the pavement below, sustaining a life-threatening head injury.
• After she gets out of the ICU, she no longer can work because the resulting brain injury makes it impossible for her to remember doctors’ orders, to focus mentally, or to comprehend numbers.
• She finds a lawyer who will file suit against the negligent landlord, on a contingency basis. A month and a half goes by and he does nothing.
• She stays in the substandard house, unable to move or work. As her unpaid leave of absence from her job draws to a close, her health insurance runs out. She is is too incapacitated to deal with the complex issues of COBRA (and does not even know about the ARRA discount, of which her employer does not inform her) and is now helpless, with $5,000 to her name, debt beyond belief, and nowhere to turn.
• Her father tries to take over her finances, get her on disability, and enroll her in the state’s substandard answer to Medicaid. He learns the lawyer has done nothing and manages to hire another lawyer, who apparently is willing to do something for her.
• Faced with a lawsuit, the landlord defaults on the house’s mortgage and allows it to be foreclosed. She receives a notice from his lender informing her she must move out by the 16th of this month: that is 12 days from today.
• She has no credit for another rental; she has no place to live; and she is too ill to move. Her father lives in a two-bedroom house in a retirement community, has no desire to house her and her unruly brood (the older girl is so sexualized that the mother’s male friend refuses to be present in the same building with her without another adult present), and has tickets to leave town on the 16th.
It’s very likely she’ll end up in a homeless shelter, at least until her father can get back into town and get her into Section 8 housing, for which she undoubtedly qualifies. She will have to declare bankruptcy again—if she legally can.
While the most immediate cause of her troubles is profligate spending and failure to live within her means, you can see that this is just a small part of a larger pattern of self-destructive behavior. We have
• an unwise marriage to a man of questionable moral character; • persistence in the marriage through a series of abusive tactics and mutual misery; • apparent inability to evade abuse; • inability or unwillingness to flee a man who may have intended to harm or kill her; • deliberate spawning of children she could not support; • dependency on a hostile husband and, later, on an elderly parent well past the ability care for an adult child and a hoard of kids; • involvement with a second, even more undesirable man; • consistent spending beyond her means; • repeated cries for parental help to deal with the self-inflicted results of these acts.
Other bankrupts I’ve known exhibit similar patterns. Like Edmund Andrews, they lack the element of marital abuse, but also like him, they have financial problems resulting from a long series of decisions, many of them nonfinancial, that were at base self-destructive. They do things to harm themselves, and irrational money behavior is only one of those things.
Has our society suffered some kind of collective madness, with the widespread frenzy for buying outrageous houses, expensive cars, costly communication plans, and wildly expensive electronic gear? I doubt it. Most people are not in bankruptcy. By far the majority of Americans live reasonably in affordable homes; if they’re about to be foreclosed, it’s because of job losses or the crime of being an American with an expensive medical condition.
My point is that people who experience serial bankruptcy indeed are “different” from most people: they’re mentally ill, made vulnerable by some compulsion to harm themselves. This is not a moral failing.
The moral failing has been in the greed and recklessness fostered by an intellectually bankrupt political, religious, and social leadership. We are all suffering from an institutional collapse brought about by short-sighted, avaricious, and foolish leaders. That is separate from the individual stories of individual citizens. As usual, because of an institutional failure, the mentally ill and those who depend on them or who have to care for them suffer the most.
