Having followed the Village Voice series, Generation Debt, I
was tops on the library request list for the book by Anya Kamenetz.
The marginally employed, debt-free, Yale graduate forgot one
important thing in the living-with-debt scheme – how student loan debt effects
your relationships.
The same issue has come up time and again. Why don’t we visit family more often. The latest guilt inducing trip is a birthday
party for Adam’s stepmother – on Long Island. And yes we’d have to stay at a hotel. And yes, we still live in Los Angeles.
Last month it was a phone call from my mother imploring me
to visit my ageing grandmother.
The month before that it was Adam’s grandfathers bar mitzvah
(and don’t ask me to explain that).
We’ve tried to honor these requests, but each one starts at
a thousand and can quickly rack up to several thousand dollars.
This month marks ten years out of school – and I’m still
living on a few hundred dollars disposable income a month. And no matter how many times Adam or I say it
– no one seems to believe that we don’t have any money.
Our families keep
saying – oh, but you’re attorneys – you should have money. Adam’s sister had her son refer to him as her
rich uncle. You’ve got to be kidding.
Two years ago we went into credit card debt – five thousand
dollars to the tune of thirteen percent interest – to spend time with Adam’s
ailing mother at Disneyworld (don’t ask – just click
here). It took us forever to pay that
off – but not before someone mentioned another trip.
The loans are persistent. They’re virtually non-dischargeable. There is no payment holiday. We’re still paying the thousands of dollars a month we were paying ten
years ago. And there are quite a few
years to go.
Sure, everyone probably agrees that education is
important. But the burden of paying for
that education has fallen on the students. And the students with lifetimes of debt can’t gallivant across the country
at the drop of a hat.
It’s perhaps a cautionary tale to parent so eager to subject
their children to a lifetime of debt. Unless you visit them, they may not be able to visit you and attend
every wedding, christening, bar mitzvah, birthday, and anniversary that comes
down the pike. If the choice lies with
staying home or staying in credit card debt – I’d rather stay home.
June 27, 2006 at 7:17 pm
Hello all,
You may not initially agree with everything I reveal, but please be a little patient with my long-winded presentation of what I have waited a very long time to be able to say. I promise to amaze and enlighten.
Now for the worst part of this horrendous equation.
Bush, Cheney, and the NeoCons are Vatican operatives hell bent on impoverishing and indebting the USA. Looks like their plans have worked like a charm while the brain-dead American public remains deluded and addicted to money, religion, and politics. Who says you can’t fool most of the people, most of the time…
Pay close attention, profundity knocks at the door, listen for the key. Be Aware! Scoffing causes blindness…
Humanity has long been deceived and deluded into thinking that money is a positive means to manage life, societies and civilizations. Chapter 2 of Revelations from the Apocalypse, Volume 1: Here is Wisdom thoroughly exposes the foundational deceptions associated with the concept of money and how it is actually a severe hardship on every aspect of life and every endeavor that must bear the burden of its unnecessary overhead and resulting stifling complexity. Money severely impedes the quality of life, society, and civilization by spawning myriad horrendous side effects (poverty, crime, wars, pollution, waste, greed, stress, etc.) which are all traced directly to its presence, purposeful shortage, and imposed requirement.
Here’s a real hot potato! Eat it up, digest it, and then feed it’s bones to the hungry…
Money was conceived millennia ago by the priesthood of ancient Babylon to subvert the resources and energies of entire populations for the benefit of a rich and powerful few. Chapter 2 further pierces the ages-old smoke and mirrors surrounding the scourge of money, banking and credit (usury) by exposing their core logic and common denominator math. It exposes the purposeful and well-sculpted math and logic trap imposed upon humanity by the Vatican, its ancient predecessors, and their secret-society cohorts.
It is abundantly clear that imposing money upon the entire world and then forcing people to participate in usury, pay taxes, compounding interest on national debts, and then to struggle their lives away for the sake of money, is extortion and great injustice on a grand scale. To cause suffering and despair for profit on such a grand scale can only be described as abominably evil. The time has finally arrived to demand a full accounting from the Papacy, Vatican, and all of their cohorts and chief supporters. They have no right to cause such overwhelming despair and suffering for millennia. They have no right to deceive practically everyone on such a grand scale. Why do our national leaders conspire with them and participate in such great evil while pretending to serve the Creator? Why do people still have blind faith in such obvious deceivers and their deceptions while they continue perpetrating such widespread and horrendous evil and abominations?
The time has come to wake-up and prove to these duplicitous scoundrels that you are only temporary marks and dupes.
Money: The Greatest Lie Ever Told