"That was $8,000 in income per seat the month the seat was selling for $400,000. He was living on this income. Then we had the tech crash. "
This is what you aren’t getting, dstark. You said the guy had 5 seats @ $8k a month, so $40k a month, and he was “living on this income.” So that’s $480k a year. Why would he live on THIS income? Why wouldn’t he live on a lesser income and sock a good chunk of it away?
He lived on less income but his income dropped 90 percent. He only made this great money for a couple of years.
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Agreed that sucks, but did he live at his means or below during his “prime years”?
Btw I came from a family where we spent like drunken sailors and it turned out to bite them in the butt. I’m very grateful my H always pushed for us to live beneath our means.
He lived below his means in the big years. He lived in a middle class area at best. Maybe his spending increased some but he didn’t move. You lose that kind of money and income so fast, it can have a big effect on a person.
Your husband did a good job.
Some people spend too much. No doubt about it.
I’m sorry, but that guy sounds like a whining, entitled, self-centered crybaby with no common sense.
He whines when he breaks his writing contract and has to, under the terms of the contract, give the advance back (which he refuses to give back and gets sued for). His excuse, “Everyone breaks those deadlines.” Well, I guess not everyone. Lame.
His wife quits her job when they can’t afford it, so they can pretend to be richer than they are and play house in the suburbs.
He not only drains all of his savings, but those of his parents, too. But then suggests that ok, because it was his future inheritance he was spending. Horrible.
Just excuse after lame excuse. Even his purported attempts to take responsibility for his situation are half-hearted and generally disingenuous.
It’s no surprise he’s broke.
My biggest worry was always eaning too much in taxable income vs real income to not being able to write a check to Uncle Sam, so I made sure we always had money set aside for that. I know a person who got socked with a $100k tax bill… except he never had that kind of money. It happens.
Very accurate in terms of day to day realities and the idea that we are mostly staying in place or losing ground.
It’s really hard to generalize. Some of us have improved our financial situation slowly but surely over time–partly through luck, partly by choosing a good spouse and sticking together for many years, partly by staying in the same house and not upgrading and not buying more houes than we could COMFORTABLY afford and maintain, as well as consistently living BELOW our means.
Really don’t feel that OP is the poster child for the middle class and his claim that he is distracts from the problems that are more common to folks typically identified as middle class.
Maybe the writer is about to go through a divorce and has aired these personal issues as an act of malice towards his wife and to better position himself when marital assets are divided. I just can’t believe that adult children aren’t affected by a parent asking for money for heating fuel. You would still love your parent but all the things that a Dad is supposed to be to a child (even a grown one) would collapse in that instant if they hadn’t already. I’m stunned that an intelligent person could write that, look it over and decide to publish it - he sacrifices the privacy of his family and should have realized to many readers he comes off as an entitled whiner. I’m in that camp and his parents were probably enablers. It’s a fascinating read and I wonder if he regrets writing it. Then again, he might not be capable of regret which might be a useful emotion when learning to handle finances.
One of the most striking things to me, is when he talks about depleting his parents savings to the point that there would be no inheritance. And that he had no regret for that. It’s one thing when the grandparents are well off and want to help pay for college with the excess, another thing when their retirement savings have been drained to pay for expensive colleges. No guilt for that?
If his mother is still alive, I hope he plans on taking care of her, if she runs out of money. Or that her grandchildren will.
Just a brief correction on the screenplay. I’m pretty sure he did not write a screenplay. I can’t find a credit for it. I think Scorcese optioned the rights to one of Gabler’s books, intending to have a screenwriter write the screenplay. But as so often is the case in Hollywood, the film was never made. Gabler, of all people, should have known that these deals frequently don’t work out.
Time after time over a thirty year period the realities of life hit him square on, but he just wouldn’t listen. Because he felt he was different, that his ship would come in. He is so fortunate that he had a credit line with the Bank of the Parents. Most of the people he purports to represent don’t.
@KKmama – I just wanted to say bless you for the job that you do. Pastors and ministers have a really tough job, and it’s so often low-paid and unappreciated.
I also like this comment of yours; I think it’s very perceptive: I think many put him down as a form of avoiding fear. If those of us who struggle financially do so because we are stupid or did something to deserve it then they are safe because they aren’t stupid and don’t deserve it.
The article is titled the Secret Shame of Middle Class Americans. Gabler bought a house that cost more than $700K house in the late 1990s, which is not middle class even by CC definition. He is equating himself with the struggles of middle income families, which he was not. That is one reason many don’t sympathize.
As mathmom says, they could have bought a nice 4-bedroom home in a suburb with arguably better schools than in EH for half that price in the mid- to late 1990s which likely would have doubled in value since that time. His house also doubled in value but looks like he spent the equity. It also looks like he quit the TV job, not that he was let go due to not being bubbly enough (or however he put it in the article). And that was in the early 1980s so was way over by the time he bought the house.
Many of us were faced with similar situations - the loan calculations said we could afford the $500K house but we bought the $250K house because we did not want to be house poor.
He says right up front in the article that this was all of his own doing. It was not that he was getting squeezed or even that he did not have paid employment, it was just about living above his means and thinking he (and his kids) somehow deserved a better life and more expensive college than he could afford. That is very different than a typical middle class family that is struggling to pay the mortgage on an inexpensive home because one adult lost his or her job. If he was getting squeezed, he had plenty of options besides continuing to dig a financial hole or take money from his parents.
I don’t get your support for him @dstark.
@mom2and,
Well… I get it. 
Huh? Get what? Your support? I really would like to understand as in other threads, even if we disagree, I have thought you made logical points. Clearly, I am not seeing that here.
Dstark, Gabler was not remotely middle class. That’s why it’s so odd that you see him as a representation of a typical squeezed middle class person. Time for a reality check.
“I also like this comment of yours; I think it’s very perceptive: I think many put him down as a form of avoiding fear. If those of us who struggle financially do so because we are stupid or did something to deserve it then they are safe because they aren’t stupid and don’t deserve it.”
The best way of “avoiding fear” is to have money in the bank. All the smug superiority over this guy doesn’t pay the electric bill.
I agree. You could call that making financial decision as others have. But it’s more about his attitude. He had a set of standard he equated with his identity a bit like an english aristocrat and won’t compromise. In him, we see a crumbling aristocrat not squeezed middle class. One can feel sorry but there’s not much others can help with. Others are hurting worse.
In the wisdom of one of my former Megacorp managers “Your problem isn’t that you don’t have enough budget. Your problem is that you don’t have a plan for success that fits your budget.” Sometimes the truth hurts.
Gabler never came up with a family spending plan that fit his available income. His spending plans always assumed income would rise, but he also didn’t have a plan to make his income rise enough. Or his income plans never succeeded.
That is probably what also hits most middle class Americans who can’t come up with $400. I can think of 2 households in my extended family that have had similar, stable, predictable incomes for years. In one household, a $1000 car repair bill would spell disaster. In the other, it would mean raiding the emergency fund and not planning a vacation this year. They don’t have different basic needs, and neither family seems to have particularly bad or good luck, but one of the families is constantly living on the edge and the other stays well back from the brink. Consistently. And you can see it in their day-to-day choices.
Choosing to spend today because your ship is going to come in tomorrow, vs. choosing to put aside money today for a rainy day because you never know when you’ll need it is something people do each and every day over a period of years and decades. Gabler shows what happens when you choose option A. Maybe his story would be more “relatable” if his income and spending were lower, but his choices mirror the choices of many actual middle class families that struggle. They never come up with a spending plan that meets their available income.
There are other families that choose option B, then get hit with job losses and medical bills and blown transmissions. Those are the ones I feel for. That’s not Gabler.