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<p>This doesn’t have to do anything about paying all of my own bills. I don’t know what you are always stating the same thing over and over again.</p>
<p>“The problem today is that young people don’t want to question authority.”</p>
<p>You’re hanging out with the wrong young people. Also – stats, please.</p>
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<p>Combined with talking, reading, and watching people in debt, I came to a conclusion that MOST people who are in debt do overspend. </p>
<p>I can find 100’s of articles about Americans and overspending. </p>
<p>Here is one article:
[Are</a> you stressed and overspending? - MSN Money](<a href=“http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Savinganddebt/Savemoney/P112490.asp]Are”>http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Savinganddebt/Savemoney/P112490.asp)</p>
<p>Here is one point in the article that I have stated before:
“Get back in touch with a hobby you enjoyed in the past, says Washington, D.C., therapist Janis Evans. Meet for tea instead of going to the mall. Find new ways to relax.”</p>
<p>As a stated before, I collect autographs as a hobby. A lot of times it doesn’t cost me a penny to obtain an autograph.</p>
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<p>No, I am hangning out and reading the right advice. Maybe you just don’t want to be questioned?</p>
<p>Just like the late George Carlin said, no matter how old you are, you should question authority and the highest quthority.</p>
<p>I agree with George Carlin. </p>
<p>And so do most of the young people I know. My question is, why do you claim most young people don’t. Methinks it’s not the young people. Methinks it’s you.
Methinks you’re diverting this whole conversation from the original argument because you’ve been proven to be young and inexperienced.</p>
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<p>I claim it because I see it. I see students that don’t question their professors if they think their test was graded wrong. When that happens to me, I always go up to the professor and show him/her that there was a mistake.</p>
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<p>Actually it was other people who diverted this whole thread.</p>
<p>I’ve been proven to be young young and inexperienced? I know I am young and inexperienced, but that doesn’t mean I can’t express my views.</p>
<p>I still don’t see stats- but I find this quote authority from your source April Lane Benson, a psychotherapist in Manhattan who treats those who have a compulsion to spend money, incredibly ironic.</p>
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<p>What is that saying ? * Physician heal thyself?*</p>
<p>I don’t hear anyone on CC spending money to relieve tension- but on real needs, where costs have often escalated while income has stagnated.</p>
<p>Ever wonder why most people cannot park in their own garage? It’s the entitlement attitude and overspending. I would say that in my area only about 5% of the cars can get into a garage. Everybody else park in the driveway or in the street. Reason being that the neighbors garages are full of excess merchandise. Why oh why?</p>
<p>But are they in debt as a result of their spending? “overspending” is in the eyes of the beholder.
Lots of people are in debt. I am, as a result of paying for my kids’ college tuition. But it is manageable debt, entered into with financial advice. Mortgage is debt, and in many cases, it is wiser to take out a 15 or 30 year loan than pay cash unless one is a billionnaire to whom a few hundred thousands or even a few millions do not make a difference. Most businesses run on debt.
Sure, there are people who are compulsive shoppers, who make bad purchases (mine go to Goodwill). But there are plenty of people who have debt for sound reasons and others through no fault of their own.</p>
<p>Move to my area, Hondu. Can’t park on the street most of the time. No driveways. We have clean garages, out of need.</p>
<p>I don’t think the garages are full of unneeded purchases- I bet they are like my garage, that is full of misc crap that my H has drug home after someone else cleaned out their basement.
We have file cabinets without drawers, a sheetmetal lathe that hasn’t been used in 25 years, skis and broken chairs and odd pieces of wood that might be used someday by someone, old paint cans, floor tiles from the 1960’s, broken light fixtures that could be repaired someday if ugly comes back.
Thats why we don’t have our car in the garage.</p>
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<p>That quote isn’t from the article I posted, but I found the article you are referring to.</p>
<p>Here is what Dr. Benson also said:
"As she began to study the scholarly literature on shopping, she realized that it was women who found shopping too easy who needed help. (According to a study published last year in The American Journal of Psychiatry, 5.8 percent of Americans are compulsive shoppers.)</p>
<p>Shopping and dieting are the two main ways that contemporary women handle the ups and downs of life, said Dr. Benson, who is a founder of the Center for Anorexia and Bulimia. Overshopping is the smiled-upon addiction. </p>
<p>Her ability to deliver sound bites is why she is one of the talking heads in a new documentary, What Would Jesus Buy? which was produced by Morgan Spurlock, whose movie Super Size Me lambasted McDonalds. She hopes the film will raise awareness about compulsive shopping. This is really a problem people want to deny, she said. They feel ashamed because it is not yet legitimized as a bona fide psychological problem.</p>
<p>She admits that sometimes she herself bought more than she needed. But I never overshopped so much that it was a financial problem, she said, explaining that other programs like Debtors Anonymous are as focused on underearners as on overspenders. I think there were times when my husband wasnt so happy with how much I was spending.</p>
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<p>I may have come on too strong when I said 9 out 10 people are in debt because of their overspending. I was exaggerating a little.</p>
<p>But I am still going to stick to my guns that MOST people are in debt because of their compulsive spending.</p>
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<p>Exactly. There are people who can’t be seen with “old items”. Therefore, the “old items” are in the garage and the brand new items are in their house.</p>
<p>Stats, insomniatic – stats! We’re all waiting with bated breath for those stats, LOL</p>
<p>What’s in the garage is kids’ old toys and bicycles, children’s books that the parents are saving for grandkids, camping equipment, a few small pieces of furniture that don’t fit in the house at the moment, but will once the kids are grown and their bedrooms are emptied, china that someone has inherited from one side of the family, a lamp that used to belong to grandma, the cushions for the lawn furniture, three rakes, two shovels, a pair of gardening gloves, six boxes of music, and so on.</p>
<p>Or at least, those are some of the things that are in my shed; if I had a garage instead of a shed, I suppose they’d be in there instead.</p>
<p>insomniatic,</p>
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<p>Of course it has something to do with you paying all of your own bills, or rather, with the fact that you DON’T.</p>
<p>Until you DO, you are not a credible source of advice.</p>
<p>Maybe an analogy will help you. Let’s say I teach a class on how to invest in the stock market and manage a personal portfolio. Someone in the class asks me about my own personal portfolio, and I answer, “Oh, I don’t have one; I’ve never gotten around to investing in stocks.” How credible a teacher would I be? Would you want to take portfolio management advice from someone who had never managed a portfolio?</p>
<p>Of course not.</p>
<p>You have never been responsible for paying for your housing, your food, your insurance, your medical expenses. You don’t pay for your tuition. You have no experience with handling the financial responsibilities of an adult.</p>
<p>You are not a credible source of advice for THIS audience. If you want to tell other young people how to save some money from their allowance, that would be different.</p>
<p>Many many many adults are in debt, because they own houses (so have a mortgage), buy cars (and get a 0% loan rather than deplete savings), pay to educate their children (as your parents are doing).</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean they are overspending.</p>
<p>No stats from insomniatic. He just pulled those numbers out of … well you can imagine. I actually think insomniatic is a 13 year old ■■■■■.</p>
<p>insomniatic - you just said yourself that you were looking to borrow $5000 because your car broke down. Why would you have a car if you didn’t have $5000 in the bank to cover this unexpected event? My father used to tell us to have 6 months of salary in the bank for raining days (just in case if you should get fired). I know people that have been out of work for 2 years in the financial business. </p>
<p>As you get older, you will begin to realize not everything is black and white, there is a lot of grey. There are some people in financial trouble because of over spend, but I would have to say a lot of it is due to unfortunate circumstances, or sacrifices we have made for our loved ones. </p>
<p>Most parents are trying to tell you, until you have walk in our shoes, it’s wrong for you to judge. Most “older people” don’t have issue being challenged by other people, it is the tone and attitude some of us have objections to. If you have a good argument you would never have to raise your tone or be derogatory to other people. I hope you will remember that when you start working someday, because you will be working with a lot of “older people” like us. And they would be able to say “be gone” to you if they don’t like the way you express yourself. Ok, now I will get off my high horse - I just keep on coming back to that.</p>
<p>insomniatic, I’m eighteen but agree with the older people here who claim that not paying your own bills means you are not credible when it comes to how others should handle their money. I agree with them not because they are older, but because my own experience has shown me how impossible it is to be fully aware of and intelligent about money when one isn’t the person dealing with keeping a roof over one’s head. It has nothing to do with your age or intelligence and everything to do with the fact that you just aren’t going to be able to get it until you’re living it. Between the age of 17 years and 11 months and 18 years and 2 months, my knowledge of smart finance (and how DIFFICULT it is!) increased by leaps and bounds. I assure you, I had read a lot about finance before turning eighteen. I can also assure you that just two months of paying rent and figuring out what to do when the ATM ate money I needed for groceries made me see how ignorant I had been only a few months before… I wasn’t at fault for being ignorant… there was no way I COULD have known before then. And this is coming from someone whose mother shopped exclusively at thrift stores and discount groceries, sometimes having to get free food from churches for much of my childhood, though she never EVER went into debt and didn’t even get her first credit card until her forties. </p>
<p>The difference between theory and practice is VAST. Claiming that not paying your own bills means nothing sounds as silly as if I claimed not having ever performed surgery doesn’t get in the way of me being a great surgeon since I’ve read a whole darn lot about it and watched a lot of videos of surgeries.</p>