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Comment by syzarian | Hacker News Reader

Almost everyone in the U.S. spends money they don’t have. We borrow to buy a car, a house, to go to college. When one does not live on the precipice of missing rent and whatnot it is easy to say, “ Don’t spend money you don’t have.” Such advice is as useless as it is easy to say.

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The thing is, if you go into debt, you eventually reach a balance of income and expenses. (Or you declare bankruptcy.) You can’t keep going into deeper debt indefinitely. If you’d taken those same actions to equalize income and expenses before going into debt, you’d be better off.

Edit to “spending money they do not have for unnecessary purchases at huge interest rates”.

Obviously, certain circumstances can cause someone to need to use credit card debt to shelter/feed themselves and their family. I would be willing to bet the vast majority of credit card interest is not caused by essential needs.

It's not useless at all. There are countries where the average workers earn 5 times less (even PPP adjusted) than our minimum wage and they don't rack up vast amounts of credit card debt, car loans, etc.

We first need to start changing our values to be more financially conservative. Once that happens and voters start making these values apparent to politicians, they can take actions that will help reduce costs for citizens.

> We first need to start changing our values to be more financially conservative.

Think about the economy! If political leaders were wanted the elderly to sacrifice thier lives to COVID "for the economy", then the overspenders have no chance of being save from bankruptcy. The purpose of a system is what it does, and the American one moves money upwards.

There’s a huge difference between borrowing money at 5% (and this loan is collateralized) to pay for a car you commute to work in, and putting a $10,000 trip on a credit card at 24% interest and then making minimum payments. The former is a good idea, the latter is a terrible idea.

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