quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

i think this guy may have made a lot of dumb decisions in his life, just sayin'.

A+++ truth bomb

Sure, he might have been median income for the DC 'burbs - but he was still stupid enough to a) live there and b) buy too much house for the area.

'Unwilling to accept life situation/actual income bracket, makes bad life decisions, decides to gamble everything on too much mortgage to support new life/family he shouldn't be" = wait, he is pretty much the face of the mortgage/credit crisis! Except that he's extra stupid because he admits to knowing his lifestyle was impossible to maintain and that he was already teetering on the brink before he took out $2700/month in a mortgage. (Not sure if that's his actual mortgage, not including taxes - which must be horrible by themself.)

In November 2005, she was hired as a full-time editor at a nonprofit organization with a salary of $60,000 a year. The problem, I told Bob, was that things were so bad that even Patty’s new job wouldn’t be enough to rescue us. Chase was now charging us 13.99 percent on our platinum card, and the rate on our SunTrust card was up to 27 percent.

2005! This still wasn't even the height of the market! And seriously how the fuck do you have a card with a 27% rate?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v134/tracerhand/Picture2.jpg

i mean

wait that's not an onion piece is it?

(though it does suggest a sense of humor peeking out from under the gray lady's hem)

the new wife would probably be doing fine on her own (sans lunkhead) with that $60,000 -- that's enough to rent a nice apartment and have a decent clothing/entertainment budget even in an expensive city. hell, i'll take it.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v134/tracerhand/Picture1-1.jpg

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104192406

(also, quiddities? you mean quibbles?)

keep up, gabby!

More from McArdle, who has read the book.

Andrews spends a lot of time defending not feeling bad, because after all, the banks shouldn't have lent him money. This is true, they shouldn't, and anyone who did should be profusely apologizing to their shareholders. But when you read the book, what you discover is that while the book is ostensibly about our Great National Borrowing Binge, for Andrews, the debt is really a sideshow. He couldn't afford to get married. At all.

After his alimony payments, Andrews was taking home $2770 a month, or about what I took home when I was a junior web editor at The Economist. On this, he expected to support a wife and several children who came attached to a meagre $700 a month in child support.

And from the comments:

---

mrmanley May 18, 2009 3:09 PM

This is the point I make when I say that middle-aged men need to think very deeply before they marry again, especially to women who have children from another marriage. In a financial sense, marriage is all downside to the man: huge expenses, legal obligations, dealing with the ex and the ex-extended family, and very little protection if (when) things go south. As I said in another thread: you better be in love, chum, because your love is all that's going to keep you warm when she takes all your s**t after the divorce.

I forget which comic first made the observation, but men would often be better served by simply picking an attractive female at random and then simply giving her half his assets. It would save time and emotional wear and tear.

But the heart wants what it wants, and expenses be damned.

(Why, yes, I am divorced. How can you tell?)

Bergamot (Replying to: mrmanley) May 18, 2009 3:17 PM

"Why, yes, I am divorced"

It's hard to imagine why...

he was still stupid enough to a) live there

wild guess about major factor in this: kids; DC public schools vs. DC suburban public schools

how the fuck do you have a card with a 27% rate

make one late payment

new wife would probably be doing fine on her own (sans lunkhead) with that $60,000

given that she has multiple kids in custody and is allegedly the one with the spendy habits, not so sure about this

make one late payment

in 2008/2009, sure. but this is in 2005, when revolving credit issuers were falling all over themselves to get in on the whole giving-money-away party. you couldn't open a mailbox without a dozen ZERO ZERO ZERO APR offers spilling out. that's aside from the UNSECURED LOAN UP TO $20K!!! and "o hai here are some checks" etc etc "offers"

i understand he had some credit challenges but the only way you can be holding a 27% apr card in 2005 is if you just like and enjoy touching hot stoves.

well if you're asking why he wouldn't convert that to something lower-rate, the answer given in the article is pretty much that he did (by borrowing against home equity, paying off cards, and then refinancing the house at a lower rate)

I don't think he is that wicked a bastard or that different from most. I wish I had made better decisions, too, and it's way easier o hold everyone else to some Warren Buffet standards than it is to do it yrself.

^^^ this

What bugs me about saying that 100K/year is middle class in NYC or DC is that living in those places is a luxury, not a right. There are lots of places in this country where 100K a year is rich. You might look down on those places and not want to live there, and I wouldn't blame you. And maybe you wouldn't be able to do the kind of work you want to do in those other places. But not getting what you want is a lot different than saying the middle class lifestyle in the US is slipping away.

what if you're born in those places? and your whole family is there? and it's all you know?

$20K a year is a lot to make in some parts of the world too you know...

and chances are if dude lived somewhere cheaper, he would be making less for the same type of job, so what's your point really?

What bugs me about saying that 100K/year is middle class in NYC or DC is that living in those places is a luxury, not a right.

tell that to the people who were born there and can't afford to move (or have job security there, or just don't fucking want to be displaced)

xposts

Ha! Hahahahah. Living in an inner city area (if they're still called that) is a "luxury"? How modern of you.

i say this as someone who was born there -- i really feel for other natives who are being squeezed out.

south bronx = luxury!

I thought the thread was about the ruling class, b/c the article is about educated people who are choosing where to live?

and yeah, living wherever you want, instead of just going where the jobs are, is a luxury, in the economy that we're a part of.

i wouldn't conflate "educated" and "ruling class."

Yeah, that's the thing -- there are lots of job sectors and skill sets where if you weren't making X pay in a more expensive urban area, you'd either be jobless entirely someplace cheaper, or making a salary that was adjusted to the lower cost of living elsewhere, or probably doing a different sort of job entirely. (If a dude makes $100k covering a DC beat for the Times, what's the advice here -- "why don't you just live someplace less expensive and commute in from West Virginia?" Or is it "why don't you make less than half that covering something for a West Virginia paper?")

When people point out the higher cost of living in these urban centers, all they're saying is that the salary figure can't be directly compared to the same figure some other places. It takes slightly more to afford the same standard of living you could get a bit more cheaply elsewhere. This isn't a big deal, just sort of something to keep in mind about the numbers.

I'm just trying to follow the title of this thread and the article that it links to.

living wherever you want, instead of just going where the jobs are, is a luxury

This DIRECTLY CONTRADICTS WHAT YOU JUST SAID, because if you are a journalist who covers national-level economics, DC is where the jobs are, and someplace less expensive is "wherever you want" -- like I said, there are lots of industries and skill sets where you're more tied to expensive urban areas. That's not something that needs to be pitied, or anything, it's just where people are, but when they're making $Xk/year it's handy to remember such things.

I don't know what the advice is, nabisco: it's a really tough question! But I think we should avoid a sense of entitlement to do the kind of work we want to do. If we can, it's wonderful.

and yeah, living wherever you want, instead of just going where the jobs are, is a luxury, in the economy that we're a part of.

where are the jobs, anyway? call centers in india? sweatshops in cambodia?

that was an xpost but I think it applies to your newest post too. It's great to be able to be a journalist who covers national-level economics. It sucks that those markets command more than journalism jobs pay.

get bent, do you think you have a right to a job wherever you want, doing whatever you want? You're making it sound like this is a no-brainer.

no, i'm just saying "going where the jobs are" isn't that easy when there are no jobs! also i don't think it's wrong to want to work at something you're actually trained/skilled/educated in.

btw I'm trying hard not to sound like a cock, if we were talking I think my tone would be cool but in type there isn't the right nuance.

Basically I look at it like this. There are 3 competing factors here:

Job X that I want to do
Standard of living Y that I want to have
Location Z that I want to live in

What to do when these clash? At best we make a tradeoff and give one up. At worst we give up all three.

like nabisco said, some people's area of expertise is national politics, and their brains and souls would atrophy pretty quickly if they had to work in a small town and cover the cats-stuck-in-trees beat.

It's totally not wrong to want to work at something you were trained for! Right now I'm really lucky that I get to do that. My tradeoff is that I live someplace that I wasn't trained for and that is totally undesirable to most educated people. I'm fortunate that I could make the tradeoff of giving up a good location in order to do the work I want to do. I know people who give up doing what they want, though, to live where they want. I don't think there's an easy solution to this clash.

Euler, I know very few people over the age of 25 (and pretty much none over the age of 30) who feel in any way entitled to do whatever job they want: most everybody winds up in a particular field with a particular skill set and a sad awareness that there is no easy option of switching horses and starting again at entry level in a completely different field

There may be some urbanites who would benefit from going off and becoming simple cabinet makers in rural Pennsylvania or whatever, but someone who has successfully worked his way up to a well-paid staff position at the nation's most prestigious newspaper is probably not one of them

xpost - I'm not even talking about brain atrophy, necessarily, but if your choice is between, say, a prestigious job for $100k in a high-cost area and a "lesser" one for $50k in a low-cost area, it's not necessarily a difficult choice. This doesn't mean we have to pity the $100k person, it just means we should remember that he/she is not just flat-out earning "twice as much" as the $50k person, due to cost-of-living issues!

I mean, it's not so complicated: there are towns where my current wages could easily afford me a house and a nice car; the issue is that in those towns I could not command my current wages; in fact, my current wages are in part based on the elevated cost of living here!

nabisco, I'd just say that living in a desirable area (that's why it's high cost) is a good in itself, and should be thought of as extra pay. So $100k in a great city has extra value than $100k in a shitty city.

this thread just took a turn for the retarded.

why do you say that, Jim?

So $100k in a great city has extra value than $100k in a shitty city.

no i see euler's point... but i guess what kind of annoyed me isn't what he's saying in particular but the general moralizing / schadenfreude that seems to be a common response to this kind of article...

Jim, I'm just trying to make the point that comparing a NYC salary to, say, a central Pennsylvania salary, isn't just a matter of comparing dollars and what you can buy with those dollars.

yeah s1ocki I feel you, I'm trying to hard to talk about this without being too moralizing or schadenfreudey, and obv. failing.