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Comment by electromagnetic | Hacker News Reader

He makes one good point, and that's that they lived lives they could afford. When you waste money on frivolous things like replacing a car because it's 'old', even though not a single warranty has run out on the vehicle, is going to place you in a very bad position. I'm sure lots of people have lost cars because they missed a few payments and then all of the money they had put into it is gone too.

Personally, I aim to never 'finance' something, aside from the house I buy. I aim to never have credit card debt, that my cards are completely clean before the end of the month.

Another thing, I want to live a life where I can afford 100% of my life, that I don't have to rely on my wife to work so that on the chance one of us loses our job we don't have 50% of our expenses to cut, we only have 10-20%.

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"The bubble has burst. We can no longer rely on consumption by refinancing our homes or inexpensive money to fuel economic growth, and that’s certainly had a huge impact..

In 1929, for example, just before the stock market crash, the private debt-to-GDP ratio was 160 percent. Last year, private sector debt as a percentage of the GDP: 300 percent; far more leverage. And you can see it’s been a steady increase basically since almost the end of World War II.

In my view, what we now have will be a fundamental economic reset. The economy is going to have to re-establish itself at a level of spending that reflects the real value of underlying assets before we can all start growing again at a healthy rate.

This may not be the thing that people really want to hear, but it’s certainly what we’re planning on, and it’s the truth on which we’re basing sort of our model, if you will, at Microsoft.

In our opinion, in order to reach the reset point, three things need to happen. First, the economy must be deleveraged. Private debt as a percentage of GDP has to be reduced. Restoring health to the nation’s financial system is a fundamental part of this."

Steve Ballmer, February 2009 Speech to Democratic Policy Confab

Yeah this is a great point and its a lesson the entire US economy has completely forgotten. The last decade - really the entire period after 1980 - is one big credit orgy. We really really really need to learn how to live within our means again and stop our debt-fueled overconsumption binge.

The last few years have been particularly disgusting. People competed to get ever-bigger and fancier houses, cars, and various toys that they really did not need.

Its time to start spending only what we earn as a nation, and individually.

Right now I'm desperate to buy a couple of games. One is Fable 2 because I loved Fable, but I'm not spending $60 on a game, I'm just waiting for the drop to $20 that inevitably happens. The other game is Fallout 3, I've been a huge fan of the series and I want to look at the 3rd, again I'm waiting for the drop to $20 however this doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon as they jacked up the price here in Canada from $60 to $70!

I worked as a game reviewer for a number of years, and this is perhaps why I can value a video game much better than most other people. I reviewed many a game that I wouldn't ever justify spending $5 on.

I mean it's like the extended warranty they try to sell you on games. Whenever I buy a DS game, they always ask me for extended warranty (It's their job, so I don't snap at them) but the SD cartridge a DS game uses is virtually indestructible through normal accidents. I've had one go through a washing machine with suds and everything in and I took it out, peeled the remnants of the label off and continued playing the game. I stepped on one on a concrete floor in boots (it fell out of my pocket when I grabbed my iPod, tangled up in the headphones or something) and no one would be the wiser. Yet they ask me if I want to spend $3 to insure something that'll survive me: if I fall off a skyscraper, if I fall in the ocean and drown, get hit by a car and numerous other things.

addendum: Something I forgot to add. I come from the UK, but I'm living in Canada. It would currently be cheaper to buy Fable 2 and Fallout 3 from the UK and have them shipped over; sadly the whole region code bullshit prevents this. Usually it means Europe pays like double the price of NA, however now that the economy is going to craps in the UK the prices for games have been put down* unlike Bethesda in NA who seem to think putting up the price of a game will make them more money.

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