Wednesday, June 13, 2007

debt in the middle class

i was listening to a radio program today and a caller phoned in and was asking a question about debt. the host basically berated her because she was carrying a lot of cc debt, but had a pretty high household income. i don't know if it was just a bad day for the host, but it's really easy to accumulate credit card debt and i would be willing to bet that it's pretty prevalent at many middle class income levels.

the fact of the matter is that debt is really readily available to us in the middle class. so readily available that i'd venture to say that if you're not educated on the matter, it's probably easier to go into debt making 100k than it is to be barely scraping by. why? i don't know. maybe there is a level of keeping up with the joneses or an i've arrived attitude or some other ridiculous notion, but whatever it is, i'm sure what the caller didn't need was to be ridiculed for making too much money. what she needed was to learn that she didn't have to spend that much!

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