Frugal Scholar has been contemplating the Edmund Andrews story with persistent horror, and I must say, his strategy to make hay with his tale of self-destruction is pretty ghastly. At one point FS refers us to Megan McArdle’s discovery, reported in McArdle’s Atlantic blog, that Andrews’s wife established a pattern of bankruptcy and unwise spending habits beginning as far back as 1998, well before the time when we could blame our financial catastrophes on greedy bankers.
Copyright © 2009 Funny about Money
In a follow-up article, McArdle remarks that the bankrupt are not like the rest of us, referring to a paper by Ning Zhu of UC Davis, who shows that although some bankruptcies result from medical costs, most result from overspending, especially on durable goods such as houses and automobiles. Zhu found that the bankrupt households in his study spent as much as the control households, despite earning far less. In thirty-eight academic pages, Zhu makes the point that most bankrupts fail to live within their means.
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.
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Copyright © 2009 Funny about Money