Current Events > Would you rather be financially destitute or in crippling debt?

(+) Yeah! (+)

In the spirit of the question Ill stick to just one of the two answers and choose living check to check with no money because being broke would be better than a mountain of debt. Who cares about the illusion? If you have huge debt you can never pay back that would be worse than just being broke check to check.

Being broke and living check to check with your head above water would suck but would show you are surviving and making it work. If you have crippling debt where you sink more and more youre just failing. That is worse.

I'll take the debt, please.

You get to a point with debt where it stops mattering. People who are thousands in debt often suffer more than people who owe hundreds of thousands. Rich people understand this.

I can't speak to anyone else, but I've been paycheck to paycheck, and I've spent my life dodging debt.

Paycheck to paycheck sucks but (at least in my case) it was a temporary problem that was solvable in the relatively short term with some frugal living. Crippling debt is just a whole lot of grief.

ai123 posted...

I'll take the debt, please.

You get to a point with debt where it stops mattering. People who are thousands in debt often suffer more than people who owe hundreds of thousands. Rich people understand this.

We might need to draw a distinction between "good" debt and "bad debt".

You can be a rich person who has millions in debt but tens of millions in assets and capital and is just living off the interest.

Or you can be someone like my brother who just maxed out a dozen credit cards in his early 20s and ended up with 6 figure debt with literally nothing to show for it.

pinky0926 posted...

We might need to draw a distinction between "good" debt and "bad debt".

You can be a rich person who has millions in debt but tens of millions in assets and capital and is just living off the interest.

Or you can be someone like my brother who just maxed out a dozen credit cards in his early 20s and ended up with 6 figure debt with literally nothing to show for it.

I was thinking more of these serial bankrupt businessmen who lose millions, but still manage to maintain a life style and move on to the next thing. They have a better time than those barely getting by.

What happened to your brother? Does he regret doing it?

Is he suffering more than someone who is under the stress of grinding out a living?

ai123 posted...

What happened to your brother? Does he regret doing it?

Is he suffering more than someone who is under the stress of grinding out a living?

He had that dangerous double-edged salesman quality of being able to make a lot of money and spend a lot of money. So he made a lot of really poor lifestyle decisions, riding the wave of his fast increasing paycheck and ever increasing lifestyle inflation. He started to just fall down the rabbit hole of putting everything on finance/credit cards because "it's fine, I can afford the repayments, and I'll be earning double this amount next year so I'll just pay it off then".

It got to the point where he was paying something like $1k per month just to cover the minimum credit card payments, and debtors were calling him every day threatening to take him to court.

I believe he's since got more of a handle on it and consolidated it and has been whittling it away, but he's still an idiot when it comes to money. His idea of a retirement portfolio is to buy a bunch of cars, restore them and sell them.

I don't want to be homeless or starve to death so debt.

If it's that bad there's always bankruptcy. Being penniless you're fucked.

ai123 posted...

I was thinking more of these serial bankrupt businessmen who lose millions, but still manage to maintain a life style and move on to the next thing. They have a better time than those barely getting by.

Oh yeah, this is better though.