“I have absolutely been borrowing more than I previously did, everything costs more and wages are low in rural Alabama,” he says. What affects him the most, he says, is the high interest on his debts.
“If you have to borrow money and can’t get it from a bank, you are going to pay interest rates at 35% and that’s just ridiculous. I took out a loan for $2,000 for 24 months, and I have to pay back over $4,000.”
The Guardian finds those Americans being hammered by high interest rates. Or, perhaps, their own choices.
Would you lend 10 quid to a 70-year-old retired arts teacher from California?
Thought not.
The one that gets me is that teachers – in the school system that is – over there do not get social security but they do get a very, very, fine school district pension. So there’s a tad of that particular example I’m not sure about.
Having been poor (I didn’t like it so I stopped), I can confirm that it’s bloody easy to stay poor.
If you’re on the wrong side of Micawber’s maxim, you will have to borrow money somehow at some point. If not from a credit card company, via hire purchase or from Legs, the friendly neighbourhood loan shark.
Borrowing money when you’re poor makes it almost impossible to escape being poor. You need to earn enough excess cash to achieve financial escape velocity from barely scraping by. Lots of jobs pay bullshit wages, so they’re not the answer.
How happy these people, certainly the four examples from deep blue California, Colorado and Oregon, must feel at the sight and thought of Brandon using executive orders to bypass Congress and use billions of taxpayer dollars to write off the entire balances, not just the interest, on student loans taken out by people who were 90% certain to vote Democrat anyway.
>Tim Worstall
April 10, 2024 at 9:07 am
The one that gets me is that teachers – in the school system that is – over there do not get social security but they do get a very, very, fine school district pension. So there’s a tad of that particular example I’m not sure about.
That’s only true in 15 states. The rest still get SS.
And, I mean, any retirement scheme *that isn’t Social Security* would be a good scheme by comparison;)
When you’re expecting to be paying out more in pensions than you’re taking in (expected in a decade or two here), its not a good retirement scheme.
Robin is a 70 year old retiree on SS disability for 20 years – so why isn’t he collecting his private pension from the school?
Also, if he can’t live on 14k /year in CA – maybe consider moving to, I don’t know . . . Arizona? Plenty of places around here where you can get by on 14k. He won’t be living any worse than he is now and he likely won’t need to borrow money to do it.