LogFAQs > #948027342

Judgmenl posted...

The commercial also had a significant impact on my world view. I remember seeing this ad run on cable TV all of the time when I was in my early teens thinking how idiotic someone would be to go into massive debt just to make themselves look good. I never had that kind of upbringing, but the kids that did sure enjoyed making fun of me for being "poor" (my parents were so anti-debt that they did not even have credit cards).

I envied the hell out of people much more well off than me.

Yeah, I think I was in early high school or late middle school when it aired.
I'd hope I'd be smart about buying a house w/o ever seeing it... Like...apparently (going by all the "how could we have possibly known how compounding interest works as teens!" excuses for taking on giant student loans) I was the only kid on earth that actually looked at what student loans would cost and what the avg. starting salary of my profession would be and chose an in state school b/c of it.
So I've always generally been not a dumb ass when it comes to financing.

But man, growing up in suburbs with all these people doing add ons and renovations to their homes, obsessively tracking how much their and their neighbors' homes were supposedly worth, and talking about maybe selling and getting something bigger and "better" all the time... It's impossible for me to say for sure that w/o some sort of wake up call like that commercial, I wouldn't have been inculcated into thinking that was normal, rational behavior.