 | Dear Grace: My girl is contributing to the global recession. What do I do?By Grace Yip |
Dear Grace,
There’s this girl I’ve been seeing for a couple of weeks now. We click and have talked until the wee hours in the morning about everything under the sun. Last night, we somehow ended up talking about our personal finances and she disclosed that she is in serious debt. I literally felt my legs twitch and point toward the door. I like her, but her massive debt makes me really nervous. What should I do?
Sincerely,
$uddenly $cared of $usan
Ooooooooooooooooooh. Rough. Two things come to mind:
1.) Is it grad school debt? Try thinking of it like a home mortgage. The monthly payments might seriously suck the big one right now, but it will/should pay off eventually*.
2.) Is it credit card debt? OMG RUN! RUN FAST AND FAR AWAY!!! No, wait. Do a quick check… does she own five road bikes and is not a cyclist? Does she own every game for every system on the market? Did she charge up a Shamrock Shake at Mickey D’s every day it was available in March? Or does she have a reason for the debt… such as a bout with unemployment? Had to pay for medical expenses? Her car died/her dog ingested a tennis ball/her Macbook fried all in the same day and she had to replace/heal/fix it?
There’s debt… and then there is HOLYFUCKINGSHITWHATDIDYOUDO debt. Ultimately, you will need to figure out if you can deal with how she deals it. If she’s on a budget and chipping away at it each month, then cut her some slack. If she booked the penthouse at the Hilton for the Dinah and is really financially more like a Days Inn kinda girl, then trust your twitchy legs. RUN.
Disclaimer: GtS is not liable should you bank on “will/should pay off eventually.” Sometimes, shit just happens, yatch.
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March 26th, 2010 at 10:56 am
Yeah, I would definitely at least probe* around with your semi-new girl to see how she got into this mess before totally shuttling out the door.
For one, how old is she? it’s easy to kind of get all caught up in socializing and shit when you’re in your early 20s, when you don’t really have any sort of authority figure telling you that you can’t, but you really don’t have a job yet that finances it.
Second of all, I’m agreeing with the Grace here – did something(s) happen that contributed to this? My girlfriend had to declare bankruptcy when she was 23 years old, and it wasn’t any one thing that did her in. It was a little of that young-and-wild party action mentioned above, a little bit of repetitive medical expenses and costly knee surgeries behind them, and then a WHOLE FUCKING LOT of a total psycho bitch girlfriend who stole her identity and lied about paying the bills she convinced her to put into her name.
So, it might not be that your special lady friend is a big financial fail (yet), but just keep an eye out and see.
*I said probe, heh heh heh.
March 27th, 2010 at 11:04 am
Sorry to inject a serious note into this, but putting the contributing personal budgeting shortcomings aside, there’s another much larger factor at play. Congress has sucked for decades. When the Supreme Court issued the Marquette decision decades ago, ruling that commerce clause allowed banks to do legalized interstate loan-sharking and impairing the usury laws of the individual states, it also ruled that since Congress has the right to regulate interstate commerce, they could simply write a law stating that individual State’s usury laws must be respected. Alternatively they could have set a national cap on usury. Instead, the Congressmen all took bribes, er, campaign contributions from the banking and credit card industries and then pretended that stopping this loan sharking was out of their hands. It’s not a Republican or Democrat thing. It’s a crook thing. So the banking executives are awarding themselves lottery winning-sized executive compensation packages whilst we “little people” fight over crumbs and get loan sharked. Sorry that the only funny thing in my comment is my girl-oriented fashion website noted above which has photos of me modeling ladies full brief panties. It’s given visiting commenters some laughs. Good luck with the global recession stuff.