Financial progress is no longer possible

The suffocation of the nation’s—and perhaps the world’s—economic backbone is now here. Leaders must act… or else.

Hi, I’m Alexander. I have a full-time job as a private security contractor, and considering the current state of affairs, I’d say it’s a pretty darn good job. I make $16.50/hour, have plenty of options for overtime, and most importantly, I have a trustworthy boss whom I have seen tested and know would never throw me under the bus in matters of work drama. My pay, annualised, is about $54K. I would be hard pressed to lose it.

I’m also married, and my husband also happens to be a private security contractor, like me. He makes considerably less, clocking in at about $26K, but his work is just as rock solid as mine and he’s not going anywhere he doesn’t want to.

My mother is also with us and provides a ton of crucial non-financial support, and feeds herself on a very modest pension she obtained as a disabled veteran. She has been forced out of work due to her knees literally collapsing as a result of the Army running her in combat boots for her 8 years of service, and the VA has been anything but prompt with both her treatment and her reassessment of compensation. Bureaucracy has become our family nightmare.

We’re looking to move in together with one of our best friends from college, a man who is a delivery driver and makes even more than I do. His job is also rock solid secure, as he is very dependable and has built a huge rapport with his boss, who happens to be the business owner.

While I haven’t done any exact math, all things considered we probably make north of $100K/year, counting everybody. My husband and I have a car between us, and said friend has his own car, both vehicles having notes attached. I need to get another car for myself soon, as our mileage has gone very high. We have an equitable plan to split rent and utilities together, too.

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The reason I am telling you all of this is because I want to underscore, in exhaustive detail, just how lucky we are as blue collar people. We have so many blessings here to count, be it job security, pensions, reliable transportation, you name it. You need to understand how fortunate we are because I am about to explain exactly how this situation is completely unworkable for us trying to progress in our financial lives.

The foremost thing that comes to my mind is that I have to save up a massive down payment to buy my budget car. Because listen, we don’t buy new cars because we’re fancy or are living beyond our means. We caught a lucky break to find down payment money for our car and put together a deliberate strategy to buy new for several reasons, including how fucked the used car market is (conventional depreciation wisdom no longer applies), plus the new car limited warranty that obviates any and all worry about breakdowns and operational failures that so commonly plague used cars. We didn’t want to have to budget in the stress, missed work, Lyft rides and exorbitant repair costs that people get saddled with driving beaters into the ground. We simply work too much and literally don’t have time for that, so financially it made the most sense in sheer dollar terms, as wild as that sounds. We have only ever considered buying the most dependable Asian sedans on the market, which ended up meaning Hyundai.

Before I can fix any of that, however, I need to clear out some consumer credit card debt. I had to move out of my old house after my landlord died and it became evident that his wife’s sons were completely irredeemable and unworkable regarding anything to do with the house. The rent was too much, the floors started falling in, the air conditioners were breaking, and I just read the writing on the wall. Unfortunately, moving meant putting the expenses associated with that on the credit cards. This is the price I paid for avoiding living single guy style with a monitor and PlayStation on my floor. (I still actually sleep on my floor.)

I still haven’t done any of that, because unfortunately my vast opportunities for overtime were cut short by workplace drama that I don’t need to get into. I count my blessings that my boss is on my side, but the reality is he’s as driven mad by them as I was, and I cannot cover shifts there, missing out on lots of money I desperately need.

I had tried to get my eyes fixed earlier in the month, and made some progress by getting a prescription. I bought some new eyeglasses that I had hoped would last me a lifetime, only to wait 3 weeks for their customer service to tell me the item is out of production. Since then I’ve shelved the plan and am wearing my old eyeglasses I got in 2018 that have an incorrect prescription now.

My husband makes money the same as always, but it’s never enough because he has had to cover the bulk of our bills and has single-handedly financed our move into this new place with our friend, leaving me to fend for myself covering the days’ meals and try to put dents in my debt with this presently unreliable schedule that is going to straighten out to that $54K figure I mentioned earlier in about a month’s time.

My mother isn’t making much progress with the VA either. The staff seem pathologically suspicious of any veteran who comes in there with a pension – they sometimes reject patients off of an unfounded belief that certain procedures will help them increase their pensions. Somehow, “preventing” this “abuse” is more important than treating sick and injured veterans the best they know how. All told, they wasted 9 months of her time to give her a surgery she needed from the start, performatively issuing all of these pointless palliative formalities and causing incalculable unnecessary damage to her knees in the process. Did I mention how she had (actually still has, until October!) an insanely dependable union job inspecting crackers for over $20/hour? As soon as she can get off her cain, she can go back in, but she may never go back because of this malpractice.

Are you getting it yet? Remember how I explained in breathless detail how financially lucky we all are? Because we still are, yet somehow, it’s never enough. Where do we find the money? Seriously, where in the living fuck do we find the money to make our lives make sense?

Where does the second car we all need come from? Currently, it’s being borrowed in mileage off of the first car, blowing the financialisation of repair plan all to hell, because we’re going to reach 50K miles well before the 30 months we’ve even owned this car and had planned to pay it off. We planned to pay this car off in 30 months and are ahead of schedule on that – this should not be a fucking problem!

And where could we ever possibly dream about buying a house? That’s never going to happen at this rate. The VA supposedly has a cosigning program, but they don’t permit anyone else besides them to also be cosigners or benefactors. Probably some mumbo jumbo about “preventing abuse”. See a pattern with those guys yet? I don’t think they can tell the difference between what’s “gaming the system” and what’s poor people trying to take care of each other.

We’re paying more rent than ever before, fortunate enough to be able to split it 4 or 5 ways, illegal immigrant style, so we can have adequate living space and not want to kill each other. There is no substantial savings possibility with this for a down payment of any kind, ever. Not even for a car, let alone a house.

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I don’t have any recommendations to policymakers about this, but I’m pretty sure plenty of people have already gone over the economics and politics of this much better than I ever could.

I’m here to tell you that people like us are bellwethers of catastrophic economic ruin that spares absolutely no one. We are the wealthiest people of a kind of wealth that is neither institutional nor collateralised in assets. We don’t owe anything but we are gold star workers, all of us, and we have been as smart as we could all think to be with every major financial decision we made.

That we of all people are now stuck running in place means the economy is in deep, deep shit. Watch out. And if you are a policymaker, do something… or else.