how in debt is really in debt?

You should really make sure you ALWAYS pay your loan installments, though, especially if they charge you extra for missing payments. Do they? I'm surprised you even have the option of defaulting - is it not taken by Direct Debit?

I am about £400 overdrawn, have a loan which is probably now down to about £6000 and which I pay back in monthly installments of £260, and I owe £1000 on a credit card, paying off about £100 per month [wishful thinking]. I consider this fairly normal and manageable, but then I only earn about £800 pm after tax so there's not much to play around with really.

then there's 150 back a month off that other loan...

so i guess i have round 650 a month left disposable. which i'm predisposed to spend on beer.

I agree with Pink - if you're bringing home £900/month after tax you shouldn't have a problem with the loans. What do you spend it all on??

That said, it doesn't look *that* bad, considering how much you earn. Are you still able to save a little bit for emergencies?

£50 a week for food and socialising
I think we spend about 50/70 pounds on food per week. :-(

My love life may be a disgrace, but I'm in perfect financial shape. Never had a credit card, never had a loan, don't have a mortgage, never even run an overdraft. DEBT! FREE!!!!

I'm not going to say how much disposable I have *now* because I make myself sick. :-)

It's certainly possible if you really want to clear your debts.

i've been trying to drum up puritanical instincts from deep inside me, but then i get bored and go to the pub.

My "college" was free!

although they are student loans which have a pretty low interest rate and are easy to pay... credit cards (of which I had $6,000 in debt) were much more difficult to pay off.

Do we have a thread for confessional stories about people in seemingly inextricable debt traps where we react with a deep ambivalence, arising from the combination the undeniable fact that they are well and truly fucked but also feeling like there are many places along the way where this could have been made not as bad? Because I feel like those stories keep getting posted and here's the latest:

https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-us/magazine/money-diary-couple-debt-us

What I am struck by here is -- I don't 100% understand how this is happening to them. A $360,000 house is an expensive house but it's not actually the kind of house a family with a $160K annual income can't afford. How is it that they literally owe the same amount on the house now as they did when they bought it 11 years ago? Their kids go to private school, but that's costing them $15K a year. Again, that's expensive, but -- that level of expense is pretty normal for someone with that household income! It doesn't sound like they're trying to live like rich people, it sounds like they're trying to live like people who make what they make. And they can't do it! Is it just the law school debt eating everything? I have questions.

that story in miniature:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ClchMaWVYAUG_-S?format=jpg

my favourite moment recently was when I was got the: "Your overnight balance was £5.18 (of my two grand overdraft) please ensure you have enough money in your account to cover any payments." Yeah give us a sec, just waiting for my ebay scam victim to pay up/praying for rain/selling my arse/priceless family heirloom/using my 15 yr old laptop to mine bitcoins ...etc

we react with a deep ambivalence, arising from the combination the undeniable fact that they are well and truly fucked but also feeling like there are many places along the way where this could have been made not as bad?

i mean yeah but i mean about everything not just yknow debt

But what are their candles? People on the internet going crazy over their kid eating Whole Foods sushi but ... you can't spend hundreds of thousand dollars on Whole Foods sushi, right?

they are clearly living well outside their means, and can't stop using credit to underwrite their lifestyle, so they're stuck in a cycle they're never gonna get out of

They took out their second mortgage which is basically why they haven't paid off anything.

But that's what I don't get -- their means are .... pretty good! Every aspect of the lifestyle they describe sounds... totally normal for a household with two parents working professional jobs. OK, not the leasing cars. But I just feel like the BIG costs of life (housing, education, and medical -- because as far as I can tell they have health insurance through work) are no more than what they should be for people in their income range! I just find myself wondering whether maybe the dad (who "manages" all the money and his wife doesn't seem to see it) has some huge undisclosed spend, like a gambling issue?

Interest rates in 2007 were ~6% so if they haven't refinanced the entire thing...then yeah. This shit isn't magic. I am sure they are just waiting for an inheritance to kick in. Or as they said one of them to die.

I guess one big thing these guys got wrong is that if they had that much debt to start with, maybe they shouldn't have put $70K in a 401(k) to start with, but should have paid down the high-interest debt instead of starting to save? But I mean there starts to be a psychological angle. If these people's attitude is "it is a given that I'll waste any money I don't lock away, if I somehow pay down the debt with a windfall I'll end up back in the same spot anyway," which is what happened when their parents tried to bail them out, then .. well, I don't know, I don't know what you can do in that situation.

xpost they make about $160k now (likely made 5-7% less in every previous year). After taxes, the mortgage, kids, food, stupid car leases, dogs, that goes pretty fast. It's doable, but these people are idiots.

I mean their mortgage each month without any insurance, points, taxes etc is already $2200.

How much could they be paying on that mortgage? Surely no more than $2K a month? Their school fees are $1K a month? Another, what, $800 a month on stupid car leases? I'm just trying to figure out whether I think a) there's some big expense they're not disclosing b) their background level of stupid spending is so high that e.g. every month they buy a new couch they like or take a $2k vacation because "they deserve" it or c) (maybe most likely) this is the spending level they've been at for 20 years without commensurate income, all financed by high-interest credit card debt so that they now have thousands of dollars a month in minimum payments just to finance the debt they've accrued over decades?

xp OK $2200 (I didn't see that in the piece and it sounds high but I guess I'm not factoring in the higher interest rates at their time of purchase..)

c) is definitely a big part of it

even if they've somehow got all their credit card debt on 0% cards and they're only repaying the minimum each month, they've got 15 of them so it's gonna add up

There are so many red flags in that article, comparing themselves to the neighbors, not disclosing money issues to each other, private schools, car leases, that TOM thinks he's good with paying bills, $15 meals for one kid, not knowing penalties for 401k early withdrawal, 15 credit cards! Ugh.

xpost i looked up what the interest rate was in 2007, so i used a simple mortgage calculator.

anyway i for one am glad theyre dead

hear hear

Listening to Adam Corolla every night would kill me.

People have poor money management skills

I don’t even bother reading about it

I mean lot of people have their own version of keeping up with the joneses, be it collecting books, records, and other dumb material things

You should read it. It's a trip. I've always wondered who are the people sustaining the junk mail business. It's these people.

leasing cars isn't the worst idea in the world, actually. If the car was a business vehicle in some way, they could get decent deductions for that.

xp OK $2200 (I didn't see that in the piece and it sounds high but I guess I'm not factoring in the higher interest rates at their time of purchase..)

Depending on where in the northeast they are, taxes and insurance could easily bring that mortgage payment to $3300-3500 a month. $1250 a month for school. They just reduced their car payment so say $500 a month there. Heating/cooling/utilities in the NE will probably be at least $300. Probably close to $300 for tv/internet/phones. USDA says $1000 for a family of 4 is a liberal grocery budget; they're five and eating at Whole Foods so $1500 minimum, probably more. Payments on $80000 of credit/personal loan debt will bring the total well over $8000/month. Then they'll need gas, home maintenance, clothing occasionally, etc. And that doesn't even address the $18000 federal tax bill and $120000 student loans that they aren't paying.

i think we accept they are spending all that money yes

$1000/month for 4 people? That's got to be a national average. ... Then again, their house was only $360k, so maybe they are closer to that average than say, someone who lives in NYC or the SF Bay Area, where it's more like $2000/month for 4 people being fairly frugal.

I kind of want to hear more about the dogs...and I don't...because they sound like terrible people. Her poor mother.

they probably had a dog that had medical problems, and vet bills can be super expensive. I don't think they are terrible people.

"Public schools = unsafe for my kid" could be a sign of terribleness, but you get so much detail about the money but nothing about their values/backgrounds so I'd hesitate to dismiss them entirely. Living in the suburbs but paying for private school doesn't make any sense to me though. Saying you shop at goodwill but then saying you have nice clothes thanks to credit cards is also weird.

I thought the "my debt story" that ran in the Baffler a while back was more useful in showing how the allure of higher ed social capital can really fuck people over

Ok, he seems like a terrible person. She just seems clueless. All dogs will have medical problems. People that adopt dogs who can't even responsibly manage themselves get no sympathy.

post yeah a bunch of the story made no sense. Maybe they have a carbon monoxide leak which follows them around.

Although I just learned that Adam Corolla is the most downloaded podcast. wtf.

Living in the suburbs but paying for private school doesn't make any sense to me though. Saying you shop at goodwill but then saying you have nice clothes thanks to credit cards is also weird.

It depends on the suburb. Not all suburbs have good schools. ... Maybe they buy housewares and furniture at goodwill but buy clothing new. These people seem fairly normal tbh.

Maybe they seem normal to me because I feel like a good 1/3 of my clients are like these people in some ways, and having a professional deal with their taxes might be one of the brightest things they do financially

I suspect in a lot of these cases people kind of lie (either to the journalist or to themselves) about how much money they earn - particularly if some of their package is tied up in incentive schemes. You can ‘earn about $70k’ on paper and earn about $40k in practice fairly easily, even if that might not be the case here.

xp
I agree that there's nothing really unusual about them. It is very difficult to learn about finance, even just on a personal level.

The thing with finance/debt is that it's really not that complicated on the conceptual level: don't spend more than you take in, pay debt that has the highest interest rates/penalties for late payment first, avoid paying more than 30% of your income on housing. But there are a lot of deep personal issues that get tied up with money, so that even when people know what they are supposed to be doing, they tend to dissociate or develop some sort of cognitive dissonance about it.

And that's just middle class people. People who live in poverty or who are close to it, often are in no-win situations financially that are just fucking heartbreaking.

That is what makes them infuriating. They don't live at poverty levels. They knowingly neglect their finances and work in insurance claims with their higher education degrees.

Ha!

Nah man millennials are turning to Wealthsimple to rage-read that insane debt story about a couple with zero financial literacy and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”-level resentment for each other.

this has to be a stealth promo for the next season of Mindhunter

I'm still marveling at the idea of their $360k house ... damn, even I could afford that.

Honestly, though, what makes these people seem normal and relatively sane and not total idiots is that at no point did either of them have a misguided idea for a small business that led to incurring tens of thousands of dollars of debt

If they had made like half the bad decisions they made instead of all of them, they would probably be in a lot better shape. It’s like there went to the “whelp, we’re screwed ten times over, might as well make it 100 times” mindset.

putting ur kid into private school cos they got punched once seems rash

I am pretty sure if they told their kids how much they were in debt the kids would start eating ramen.

I wonder how much or if they were paid for this story. Was any of it verified? My partner and I would definitely make up some whirlwind debt bullshit story to drive the readership of "Wealthsimple" crazy. Would possibly do it for free. perhaps this is what eephus! was getting at.

No, I am not cynical enough to think this is fake, I more just thought maybe there were even more embarrassing money sinks that the couple was too ashamed to disclose (or that one wasn't willing to disclose to the other....)

The only celebrity finance profile I had ever read from wealthsimple was the Anthony Bourdain one. I started skimming the Roxanne Gay one today while reading the tweets about this ridiculous couple.

I like how this is tormenting people on twitter who are also trying to find hope that it isn't real.

I follow someone on twitter who occasionally quotes junk from some financial advice reddit thing and some people are just phenomenally bad at making loan decisions (one loan good, two loans better if it keeps you going) or they have a terminal case of keeping up with the neighbors

in my experience the worst things are the small comforts that add up, the little signifiers that some people judge you by. like when I was a kid there were some adults who were sure anyone paying for cable tv was overspending on frivolities! it’s not right, but yeah, you spend enough on small things — streaming video (today’s cable?), going out to lunch every day, small vices like drinking, not escaping a run to the store without buying ephemeral junk — that’s an easy way to diminish how much you save

all the bad stories with real heavy debt, where it’s not just a normal person trying to tackle student loans and medical bills, involve some line item where they wave away a luxury suv for hauling kids to school and a bmw for the other spouse to drive, both purchased or leased with zero money down and ohhh god

the luxury suv and bmw people are nothing compared to the "I am going to borrow several hundred thousand dollars and start a business that is likely to fail" people

i call those ppl dad and you can be both types ime

It's like this ridiculous guy with no business knowledge, who never worked in a restaurant that opened a restaurant with his pension (and had to sell his house to cover bills) because he just really liked food. https://torontolife.com/food/restaurant-ruined-life/

My parents tried to take over a coffee shop as a fun thing to do after retirement, despite not even drinking coffee. Thankfully, they only sunk 2k in it and ran it 2 months before the sale of the coffee shop to them failed to go through.

running a restaurant is a dodgy enough proposition if one has both culinary and business knowledge!

I'm not gleeful at the failures of these people, but it makes me happy that stories like this get widely shared, because even though they seem egregious they're common failures that people are generally far too ashamed to share. Half of the reason these things happen in the first place is because people too easily buy into the "you can achieve anything!" and "you deserve the world!" narratives that are literally everywhere in the culture, and completely ignore the minimal odds of success or consequences of attempting to live the kind of life you see in the movies and on TV. Or on the uh...Adam Corolla podcast?

something about the thought of having Carolla's voice in your head as you fall asleep is just absolutely haunting to me.

yeah, feel like a lot of this is a case of tons of little "extra" decisions that they get so used to that they look around and it's like i don't get it, we live normally, what's wrong? and the thing is they've never really made choices between a lot of things that are sort of 5% or 10% more than they should be spending on whatever category. the only family budget meetings are the "why are we so horribly in debt" ones, not "okay, private school for jenny, what are we going to give up to make that work?"

also, i also know very little about the home market but $360,000 sounds high-ish for two parents and three kids....? i realize they wouldn't be instantly out of their jam if they'd shaved 20 or 50 or 75K off of that, but maybe it's more evidence of an inability to see anything below that as being appropriate for them. see also the $15 sushi for the one kid. that's insane. their accountant needs to be telling them, look, people richer than you can afford to do that. you aren't as rich as them. you can't afford to do that. you are in debt. stop doing that.

I don't know who Adam Carolla is (& I'm not going to look it up) but all I can think of is that Adam "veejay" on MTV all those years ago, and I lol

Credit cards are terrifying. We still have an American one that we never use and should probably cancel, but I don't even know how to get one here in France. Whereas in the USA I got an offer for a new credit card every day it seemed.

I was looking into getting a loan for a car soon and my bank says I won't be approved for one, presumably because I have no debt and therefore no debt history. So I'm probably going to have to get a credit card and buy something with it just to pay it off and see if that helps. I'll also probably be taking this opportunity to close my bank account because ffs I've had an account there for nearly 30 years and they won't give me a loan? Wankers.

360k for a family of 5 is probably not super high in a moderately priced suburb, but they already had a house with 10 years worth of equity, leading up to 2007, i'm confused why they aren't close to done with paying on it. no i'm not confused, they are morons. if they downsized like mad and put their kids in public school and stuff they could pay off their shit but they won't. i hate them. i'm mad i read that.

Their house was $360,000 over 10 years ago? so hopefully it's appreciated by now. and if their neighbors are that well off there is no way that the public schools there are bad. I like how most of twitter is like THESE PEOPLE ARE SO WHITE.

omg and the joke about how she should put the divorce on the nordstrom card. LOL

You can get a graduate degree in advertising?

i call those ppl dad and you can be both types ime

― old yeller-at-clouds (darraghmac), Wednesday, November 21, 2018 1:43 AM (six hours ago)

very true. My mom's parents were kinda both types of those ppl but somehow managed to get lucky and have amazing timing in like, selling their various houses that they always turned out okay. My mom saw them as a cautionary tale: even though they had impressive luck, she doubted that was inheritable. She is very financially prudent.

both these stories, these people are being really really really dumb and unrealistic

though i can't lie i do see certain impulses and poor decisions that i've done in my own life, although on a much smaller scale

i fundamentally lack the nerve to get into that much debt, but i've certainly made bad decisions in my financial life

360k for a family of 5 is probably not super high in a moderately priced suburb, but they already had a house with 10 years worth of equity, leading up to 2007, i'm confused why they aren't close to done with paying on it. no i'm not confused, they are morons. if they downsized like mad and put their kids in public school and stuff they could pay off their shit but they won't. i hate them. i'm mad i read that.

― forensic plumber (harbl), Wednesday, November 21, 2018 3:27 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

<3 u harbl!!!

xp you become a billboard with a doctorate like in gatsby

i think the thing is, that these people kinda remind me of my former boss. She and her husband had a similar income level, two teenage kids in private school (they did get financial aid), they have a history of bankruptcy, student loans that are not getting paid off, my boss would constantly be overdrawn at the bank with maxed out credit cards but buy expensive coffee drinks at work, and take friends out to dinner or buy them drinks afterwards ... granted, a large part of the reason she is my former boss is that her financial habits extended to the workplace and it was my job to make sure the organization was being financially well-managed.

People need to take a note from Kavanaugh, that vaping congressman, Trump, et al. Go into politics to fund your staggering debt.

A) the people are irresponsible, but also they’re not living absolutely outlandishly (except for the $40000 they squandered from each of their parents)

B) these people seem totally unfamiliar with the concept of lifestyle creep

C) 360,000 is not a lot for a house in the Northeast. Boston metro real estate prices are (median) >500,000k

D) private school is a bullshit expense for this family. Two parents with professional degrees are gonna be fine. Screw the middle-class condescension about public education

yeah, congrats on putting your kids in private school, they may get a 20% better education but they'll be 200% bigger assholes

It's like this ridiculous guy with no business knowledge, who never worked in a restaurant that opened a restaurant with his pension (and had to sell his house to cover bills) because he just really liked food.

people who love restaurants yet never read kitchen confidential

actually the third paragraph specifically mentions his "well-thumbed copy of Kitchen Confidential" lol

My mom got me a credit card in my name when I turned 16 that had a $450 limit so I could learn how to pay it off every month and not to spend money that I didn't have in the bank.

I obv didn’t click the link. Jesus dude. I can’t read about any of these people, they make me so mad.

it's a financial horror film. (and also maybe fake?)

I didn't read it that closely, but I don't recall seeing anywhere that they were getting foreclosed upon and were trying to figure out how not to be homeless, that they were selling their belongings on ebay, that the wife had medical conditions so she couldn't do her job and became a sex worker, that the husband struggled with substance abuse, got a DUI, and had to install some expensive breathalyzer thing on his car so he could go to work and pay for food ... like, I don't see where the horror is

the horror is the realization that we live in a system that showers material wealth on nincompoops?

This whole cautionary tale shtick is extremely relative which I'm sure is part of the point

That horror has almost always been with us?

it is like the part of a horror film where the person about to be murdered is doing stupid stuff that will inevitably result in their murder

These people look like geniuses compared to various members of the British Royal Family, past and present

Campfire ghost stories for the white Middle class

that's the thing, if it were like a film, it would be more like Weekend at Bernie's

or that BBC show with the middle aged ladies that were all named after flowers

xpost It's horrible because they don't have a reason to be in that much debt. It's all entitlement.

The judgement of their financial incompetence is very much part of the point as well, maybe not so much ghost stories as Hilaire Belloc punishment fantasies

maybe the pre-embezzlement prequel to Weekend at Bernie's

i think ilx just got a netflix deal

It's also super annoying that they get their student loans curbed and get financial aid for their kids' grade school while making 160k a year.

Our next-door neighbors take expensive vacations, and they get to euthanize their dogs every couple months -- and we're talking purebred, $3,000, $4,000 dogs. We get all our dogs used, from Goodwill, and we're still paying off the bill from putting the last one to sleep. Tom, what was that guy's name who put Charlie to sleep?

netfilx

their kid's school cost $30k a year without financial aid! That's more expensive than tuition at an Ivy in the 90s! The fact that a middle class family has to apply for financial aid for high school is the real horror story. Presumably there are people that can easily pay that much, which is even more awful because it shows the incredible income disparity in this country.

Or they could just go to public school. Private schools are all about reinforcing class structures. They can charge whatever they want.

Presumably the price of tuition is a feature...

I kinda don't want to veer into "judging other people's parenting" territory, esp. as someone who doesn't have kids.

Our next-door neighbors take expensive vacations, and they get to euthanize their dogs every couple months

er, what?

Oh, I judge them for that. When people use their kids as props to extend their own privilege, and duck behind “parenting choices,” I’m damned merciless.

(Not that you were saying that...)

i mean, that is my instinct too, esp. as someone who went to public school through high school, then got a scholarship to a college where most of my classmates were extensions of their parents' privilege, and it was a great example of the Marxist concept of reproducing the means of production

to the point where, one of my classmates that I spent many afternoons discussing critical theory essays in academic anthologies, I recently discovered, had recently published an essay in a critical theory anthology of the exact same kind we read in college

these ppl should not be getting financial aid to put their kids into private school

the financial aid is from the school. It's along the lines of overpriced luxury goods that are perpetually on sale for 40% off

though now they could put money into a 529 plan and use it for private school tuition

of the things they're telling us about, the private school seems like the most financially baffling choice if they're not balancing it by cutting back in some other area. if $350,000 houses are typical where they are, can the public schools really be so badly underfunded?

that being said i think the sushi anecdote could be way more revealing of what's going on under the surface. i'm betting everybody in the family has all kinds of gadgets and shit they don't need, probably buying $25 staplers and $50 deluxe vinyl reissues of stuff and the like, super expensive cable package when all they really need is like the internet, netflix, and a library card for movies. all these transactions that don't come up in articles like this because to people with serious lifestyle creep they aren't visible as causes of debt the way the $10,000 and up items are. i get that when both parents work it's easy to fall into eating out a lot and stuff but i would love to know how often these idiots muster concepts like "might be a night to just throw together some grilled cheeses and canned tomato soup." when a meal for one of your three kids, before the drink, costs $15, things are horribly, horribly wrong.

netflix-wise i really do think this would be a viable reality show, in the gordon ramsay "someone comes in and yells at you and makes you change everything" genre. if anybody should be getting austerity forced upon their economic lives it's people like this.

would watch

would watch if the ramsay figure also ranted about people with money having no stake in public education being dangerous to society

Maybe someone can get Adam Corolla to do a podcast about declaring bankruptcy makes one a man's man

if $350,000 houses are typical where they are, can the public schools really be so badly underfunded?

uh, where I am $350k houses are a steal, like average is like $600k, and the public schools are largely considered bad

The prices of their two houses for the years that they bought them were not cheap.

nobody needs a 350k house and im in dublin folks

theyre an example, among other things, of shitppl justifying their shittiness by just pointing to their kids and wailing "its for them!

Maybe we should figure out where these people live? Like, if they live in Pittsburgh, fine, probably not cheap. But as someone else mentioned upthread, Boston area, totally reasonable price

If they were renting their house, the rent would be about what, $2400/month? Is a 4 bedroom house where you live considered expensive or cheap for the rent of $2400/month?

Median price of a house in Portland is now in the near neighborhood of $300,000. Which is not good. Housing cost and unaffordable rents are considered to have reached the crisis point around here, because wages and salaries have not risen enough to support this kind of an overblown market.

xp 2400 euro pm v much lower end of a 4 bed but then we dont know city centre or even what city

160kpa kinda makes it redundant tbh

did... a sarahell write this

Median home value in Portland is $422,400

???

If it cost? (valued at) 360k to build their house in 2007 and if they live in a Boston suburb, I would assume they could sell it for at least $750k now (without knowing anything about Boston suburbs). I've only bought places in Brooklyn, Queens and another country so I can't really gauge other cities.

median house price in Sydney dropped 7.6% to $1,144,217 this year, so as usual megalols at any American opinions on this topic

aussie dollars

???

Considering the pattern of brilliance of these people, they probably could have done better by not building their house, but buying one that already existed. Okay, the building the house detail is one that didn't sink in until now ... I bet their General Contractor did very well financially from the job

That’s about $830k American. Zillow says the average home listed for sale in NYC is $825k

Yeah, I think you can still get one bedroom apartments for maybe in the 400k range in some neighborhoods in NYC.

Average in terms of residential real estate sales is such a non-informative measurement ... I mean, it gives you some sense of comparison between different areas, but it doesn't really say much about what you can actually buy because there is so much variety. Generally they go with the median value.

i am willing to concede that as a likely-permanent renter, i know very little about home prices. something about their overall vibe and the sushi price made me think they'd likely gone for a cavernous mcmansion when they could have gotten a nice, humble old ranch. maybe that's what happened. or maybe, as i believe, the real problems are in the smaller-ticket purchases.

that being said - one kid's 11, one's 13, one's 18. given their socioeconomic status i sort of imagine the 18-year-old is going to move away for college. so sell the house and trade down for something a little cozier, so long as there's room somewhere to put college kid up during the holidays. and to the extent that they may have overbought in the first place, use this as an attempt to shift towards ranch life. i get the vague impression they're avoiding making cutbacks of any kind because they think their world would come tumbling down if they sat down their kids and said "we're not super-rich and can't live like super-rich people."

They know they have to slice their overhead by like 60% and she needs to start using her JD to make money. They just don't want to do it.

not sure you can automatically make more than 70k with a JD

First year associates make around mid six figures most places.

They flunked out of a credit counseling program!

Like, if they live in Pittsburgh, fine, probably not cheap.

my mom owns a house in pittsburgh, in an area with good schools, that is worth a third as much. probably not big enough for a couple + three kids, but still

xxp hmmm that is higher than (double) what most salary websites say. anyway, she hasn't used it for 15 years, and that seems bad.

it depends on the size of the firm but especially in the NE cities it's pretty much standard across all the firms.

since when and i may be missing out on something american here is a ranch small

ranch-style house, one story generally modest by us standards, 1000-2000 sq ft, also tend to be older depending where you are

ty

Most things in the U.S. are available in both ranch style and nacho cheese style.

Rancho only available in the southwest though

my neighbor euthanized their dogs nacho cheese style

euthanising the kids here might go some way to ameliorating their issues. euthanise their leasesd cars next