In the May 2016 edition of The Atlantic, Neal Gabler has an article titled “The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans.” Gabler begins his piece with a Federal Reserve Board survey claiming that 47% of Americans faced by an emergency costing $400 would either have to borrow the money or would be unable to come up with that amount of cash. Gabler then examines the broken finances of America’s middle class, using national statistics and his own often depleted bank account for his evidence.
Gabler is a writer of books and articles, and has appeared frequently on television, and I have no reason to doubt his claims of debt. Yet as he himself admits, many of his financial problems stem from decisions he made in the past. He chose the life of a writer. He lives in New York with its high cost of living. He makes his home in the East Hamptons, an expensive bit of turf on Long Island. He and his wife sent their two daughters to private schools, and then paid, with some help from grandparents, for the young women to continue their education at costly universities like Sanford and Emory. Finally—and many of us are familiar with this part of his lament—taxes have gobbled up a considerable portion of his income.
Although many in the middle class have lived less extravagantly than Gabler, a good number of us know the secret shame of which he speaks. Friends and neighbors see us as prospering, when in truth we live week-to-week and sometimes day-to-day on our earnings.
Here I will not review the figures and statistics showing the dire financial straits in which nearly a majority of Americans live. Those interested in such figures should start with Gabler’s article and then explore the subject online.
Instead, I will add to Gabler’s insights my own experiences.
I am a teacher and a writer. As a writer, I couldn’t exist more than a month on the money earned annually from my printed words. The great bulk of my income comes from teaching. Homeschoolers attend my weekly seminars, and their parents pay me directly for instructing their children in such subjects as Latin, history, literature, and composition.
Because many of the students take my classes for four, five, or even six years, I come to know them and their families reasonably well. Some of the families I’ve known appear outwardly prosperous—a nice house, a van and a second car, well-dressed and well-fed children who play sports and take lessons in dance and piano—but the parents are in reality struggling from month to month just to pay their bills. Like Gabler, some may spend too much on their children’s extracurricular activities and some may be living beyond their means. For most of these men and women, however, simply trying to earn a living, much less maintain any kind of savings account for emergencies, is a daunting proposition. Some of these parents must pay me incrementally throughout the semester, and a few must wait to make their payments at the end of the semester.
Toward these families I feel great sympathy. I know exactly what they are suffering. For twenty years debt was a black cloud hanging over everything I did, mostly because of choices my wife and I made. From 1982 to 2004, the year of her death, we operated a bed-and-breakfast and a bookstore. Kris also served for several years as the director of a shelter for battered women and then as a clinical nursing instructor. She sold Discovery Toys on the side. In addition to running the bed-and-breakfast and bookstore, I worked part-time as a teacher.
Yet there was never enough money to pay the bills. Neither the bed-and-breakfast nor the bookstore produced enough of a cash flow to meet the needs of our growing family. Those were the days when we raced to make a bank deposit before 2:00 in the afternoon to avoid bouncing checks, when we couldn’t afford piano lessons or other activities for our children, when we lived through what I called our “oatmeal winters.” For those twenty years, we worked half-a-dozen different jobs between us, while falling deeper and deeper into debt.
Two years after Kris’s death, I sold the bed-and-breakfast, the enterprise that had sucked up so much of our earnings. I walked away from that sale with little money, but for the first time in twenty years I was debt-free. I paid off the mortgage on the house and the tens of thousands of dollars we owed to creditors, shook the dust from my shoes, and vowed never to go into debt again.
Since that time, with the exception of car payments, I have kept my vow. The headaches that once plagued me have vanished. The stress of answering the phone for fear the caller was a creditor is no more. Because my wife and I lived so frugally all those years, I now am happy and content to live simply. As for retirement, I knew twenty years ago that I would never be able to retire. Fortunately, I love my what I do and so accept with equanimity the notion that I will work until illness or general decrepitude prevents me from doing so.
In my mid-twenties I lived for three years in what the federal government would today call poverty. I have lived in debt, and I have lived in poverty, and I would take poverty over debt in any circumstance. Debt—deep, unrelenting debt—is like a cancer, thwarting ambitions, straining marriages, and beating down life itself.
If you are young and in debt, try your best to break free of those chains. Read—and then practice—the advice offered by such financial gurus as Dave Ramsey. Cut, dig, scrape, scrabble: do what you must, but get out of debt.
And if you aren’t in hock to a credit card company, or to the bank other than for a mortgage or car payments, make every effort, every sacrifice, to keep things that way.
Although many in the middle class have lived less extravagantly than Gabler, a good number of us know the secret shame of which he speaks. Friends and neighbors see us as prospering, when in truth we live week-to-week and sometimes day-to-day on our earnings.
Here I will not review the figures and statistics showing the dire financial straits in which nearly a majority of Americans live. Those interested in such figures should start with Gabler’s article and then explore the subject online.
Instead, I will add to Gabler’s insights my own experiences.
I am a teacher and a writer. As a writer, I couldn’t exist more than a month on the money earned annually from my printed words. The great bulk of my income comes from teaching. Homeschoolers attend my weekly seminars, and their parents pay me directly for instructing their children in such subjects as Latin, history, literature, and composition.
Because many of the students take my classes for four, five, or even six years, I come to know them and their families reasonably well. Some of the families I’ve known appear outwardly prosperous—a nice house, a van and a second car, well-dressed and well-fed children who play sports and take lessons in dance and piano—but the parents are in reality struggling from month to month just to pay their bills. Like Gabler, some may spend too much on their children’s extracurricular activities and some may be living beyond their means. For most of these men and women, however, simply trying to earn a living, much less maintain any kind of savings account for emergencies, is a daunting proposition. Some of these parents must pay me incrementally throughout the semester, and a few must wait to make their payments at the end of the semester.
Toward these families I feel great sympathy. I know exactly what they are suffering. For twenty years debt was a black cloud hanging over everything I did, mostly because of choices my wife and I made. From 1982 to 2004, the year of her death, we operated a bed-and-breakfast and a bookstore. Kris also served for several years as the director of a shelter for battered women and then as a clinical nursing instructor. She sold Discovery Toys on the side. In addition to running the bed-and-breakfast and bookstore, I worked part-time as a teacher.
Yet there was never enough money to pay the bills. Neither the bed-and-breakfast nor the bookstore produced enough of a cash flow to meet the needs of our growing family. Those were the days when we raced to make a bank deposit before 2:00 in the afternoon to avoid bouncing checks, when we couldn’t afford piano lessons or other activities for our children, when we lived through what I called our “oatmeal winters.” For those twenty years, we worked half-a-dozen different jobs between us, while falling deeper and deeper into debt.
Two years after Kris’s death, I sold the bed-and-breakfast, the enterprise that had sucked up so much of our earnings. I walked away from that sale with little money, but for the first time in twenty years I was debt-free. I paid off the mortgage on the house and the tens of thousands of dollars we owed to creditors, shook the dust from my shoes, and vowed never to go into debt again.
Since that time, with the exception of car payments, I have kept my vow. The headaches that once plagued me have vanished. The stress of answering the phone for fear the caller was a creditor is no more. Because my wife and I lived so frugally all those years, I now am happy and content to live simply. As for retirement, I knew twenty years ago that I would never be able to retire. Fortunately, I love my what I do and so accept with equanimity the notion that I will work until illness or general decrepitude prevents me from doing so.
In my mid-twenties I lived for three years in what the federal government would today call poverty. I have lived in debt, and I have lived in poverty, and I would take poverty over debt in any circumstance. Debt—deep, unrelenting debt—is like a cancer, thwarting ambitions, straining marriages, and beating down life itself.
If you are young and in debt, try your best to break free of those chains. Read—and then practice—the advice offered by such financial gurus as Dave Ramsey. Cut, dig, scrape, scrabble: do what you must, but get out of debt.
And if you aren’t in hock to a credit card company, or to the bank other than for a mortgage or car payments, make every effort, every sacrifice, to keep things that way.