Most belgians will take a loan for building a house. Some will take a loan for buying a car. Can't think of many other reasons people i know are in debt.
Although with my house and the kid, my money goes out the door faster than i can say "maybe i could buy a game"

Priorities .. pff

BTW, do you have SMS loans in Belgium or US?

What's an SMS loan?

Most Americans are in debt for house, car, and credit cards. Usually all three at the same time. I have a bit of credit card debt right now, but it's very little... I can pay it off in a month easily. Most people are into the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars.

Well it is a very simple way of getting into some serious debt. They've been around here for some time now. Im quite amazed you havent heard of it. Basically it is a very quick but not a very big loan, say about 1000$. The idea is that you can apply for some quick cash via text message.

Unfortunately none of them seem to have english website so i cant link it.

Here's a link to the estonian portal talking about sms loan.
http://www.eesti.ee/eng/teemad/consumer ... sms_loans/

1000 bucks loan with one SMS? Shit! Where can I sign up?!

But seriously, that's a pretty dangerous development. Not for people like us, but for the scum of the earth. You know the kind, the people who send text messages all evening to a chat channel that appears on night-time tv. Or send texts to hear how well they and their crush would go together. Or participate in tv telephone game scams.

Anyway...aren't the penalties for being below your credit limit pretty hefty? I remember the company credit card I had at my previous job and I missed paying off a little debt I had on it one month. The penalty fee was much higher than what I actually was in debt. So I assume all those credit card people are just sinking deeper and deeper in.

I don't think most middle class people have any credit debt here. House loans, that's usually the extent of it once they're over 30. But houses are a lot more expensive here (relatively speaking) than in the US. Land is more expensive because there's a lot less space.

Thats why i have a prepaid credit card. I have a limit on the card for the amount that is as collateral in the bank. I do not pay interests of any kind in fact the collateral earns me interest (a very low one but still some) but for all purposes it is still a credit card.

I use my card for everyday expenses (but i do not withdraw money from it) because later it is very simple to see where and how i spent my money. For fixed costs (like communal costs of my summer apartment, automatic membership fees(Defence League, EROA etc)) i still have to look at the overall transaction list though.

I use a credit card fairly regularly, but pay it off regularly as well. I basically use it like a debit card, but since I earn "points" I get kinda rewarded for using it. And since I don't carry over much in the way of a balance, and have a fairly low interest rate, it doesn't cost me much. Plus it improves my credit rating which is key to buying a house and a car in the future.

Regarding SMS loans, never heard of it. They may not be common over here. A common one people bury themselves in are "pay day" loans. Basically you go to a shop and get a "loan" for your next pay check... then when you get paid you have to pay them back plus interest. I believe the interest rates are ridiculous... and if you can't afford to pay it back you start getting into real trouble. That kind of stuff is common. Also common are secured loans where you use a house or a car as collateral. I'm sure you can imagine how that turns out.

Wow @ pay day loans. Sorry for stating the obvious here, but that sounds like the most retarded loan plan ever. Are there really many people who go for it? And for what? So they can buy their bigger TV a month early? Dang.

From the sound of it, doing it just once could be enough to put you in a loan cycle for ages if your wages aren't very high.

Disregarding proper poverty here - the sort of being born into misery and/or being dealt a terrible hand by fate - I found that most poor people I know have, first and foremost, fucked up priorities. They gush on unnecessary things that they can't really afford or shouldn't be spending money on that could be saved for things like (later) bills. Or they invest outrageous amount in hobbies like tuning their car or going out to clubs in the weekend (cost tons).

When I'm in budget trouble, I just lock down on everything that I can miss. Turn off the heating whenever possible, using as few electronic applications as possible, not buying new books or games unless really cheap, not buying movies and music, eating much less and always at home (sandwiches)...even giving up internet connection if I have to. :p

I'm sure I told you before about that friend I used to have whose parents were poor. She would go on and on about how her family would use their wages to pay off their debt every month, effectively starting every month at 0 € or so. But they were 4 kids, and they ALL HAD A TV IN THEIR ROOM. As did the parents. And there was a big tv downstairs. I WTF'ed pretty hard. My parents are lower middle class, and I never would have dreamed of a tv or pc on my room. So yeah, that kind of puts things in perspective. I didn't even have my own pc until in my early twenties.


P.S. how does "credit rating" work? We don't have that here, but from the Americans I spoke to I gathered it was the one thing that, in some ways, determined your 'worth' in society. That's stating it a bit strong, but still. I don't think it's really a thing here. Obviously the amount of money you can loan is dependent of your income and collateral, but there is really no such thing as "credit history", in that most people who can afford a loan won't have any debts normally speaking. Why would anyone who's deep in debt loan a large amount anyway?

yea, other than the truly poor (who usually have no skills to sell, and that's their fault too), most people that are "poor" just spend all their money on crap. And are lazy and may not go to work all the time and thus lose their jobs. At least in the first world, I thing poverty is something most people put themselves in... anyone with a drive can get out of it.

Re credit rating, basically it's a numerical rating on how reliable you are for having credit given to you. It's tracked by 3 public companies... for the most part, any time you want a credit card, a loan, a car, etc, people will get your credit rating to see if you're "economically reliable" enough to qualify. Things like income are also taken into account.

With a credit rating, your credit goes up as you accumulate and pay off debts. Having several credit cards you use but keep on is a boost to credit rating. Being late on a payment is a negative. etc etc. It has a major effect on people in the US, at least when you're talking about buying stuff that requires a loan.

Well, I disagree on the truly poor being singularily responsible for their own poverty, but other than that I think we're on the same frequency. You shouldn't underestimate the impact a bad upbringing can have on a person, no matter how driven they are. Did you read Malcom Gladwell's Outliers? There's a story about the life of Chris Langan, who has one of the highest IQ's ever recorded but came from a broken home.

It's not that he ended up badly - he's got a nice house and a wife iirc - but his life, especially his academic and professional career, is a series of missed chances and denied opportunities. For someone with his potential, he's effectively been spit out by the 'establishment' and he works on his own theory of everything now. Point is: the problem never was that he wasn't smart enough or motivated enough, he had both in heaps. But when it came down to it he just couldn't find his way in the system. He didn't know how to act, didn't know the 'rules', didn't understand the machinations and often radically refused some options offered to him. In short, his problem was that he was unable to cope with the side of things you can't learn in books or high school: how things work outside of the worker's environment. After failing at college he did a string of blue collar jobs like construction work and working as a bouncer, heh.

I notice a similar knee-jerk reflex in my dumb-ass high school trained colleagues: they feel threatened when I engage in or talk about anything having to do with my academic background, often to the point of becoming aggressive in one way or another. They don't know how to imagine it and feel lost (and inferior) when they're put in that position, because nothing ever prepared them for it. Not their family, not their environment, not their teachers. 80% of all my fellow students at Uni had parents who both had academic degrees themselves - so yeah, your background plays a huge role.

Anyway...outliers is a very interesting book, and recommended. Its most important achievement is pointing out the huge role that the factors of chance, background and to just keep on trying play . Success in life is often much more correlated to those influences than any sort of inherent talent. And while willpower is extremely important, it doesn't always mean much when the other factors are lacking (as the Langan story showed).

Thanks for the concise credit rating explanation! I bumped into the term again yesterday when watching a Family Guy episode, when they were talking about who they would rather start a business with and one of them asks 'I dunno, what is his credit rating?'. So I'm guessing reliability and financial worth for non-extremely rich people is measured almost exclusively by your credit rating in the US?

The more important question is, is he an exception to the rule or does he represent the majority.

There are two things poor people fail to understand.

You cant be rich alone (unknown)

and

You can achieve pretty much everything in life as long as you help other people to achieve what they want. (zig ziglar)

Ofcourse there's social convenience aspect which is the mother of all failures.

I'm not sure I understand the bulk of your post Care to explain?

And, well, clearly it's not an all-encompassing rule and some people manage to make it and others don't. But overall you see that children from better backgrounds are born with a much bigger sense of 'entitlement'. Not in the negative sense per se. Anyway, I won't parrot Gladwell's book here, so maybe you should just read it.

The privileged find everything generally easier.

The privileged usually have opportunity readily available, while the underprivileged do not. Professionally speaking, it really is more 'who you know' than 'what you know'. At least to a degree. That's one of the reasons I'm in a highly technical field... what you know is extremely important. Though who you know still counts. As does ass kissing. I hate ass kissing.

regarding your novella about the novel, I guess who the fault rests with regarding the guy's inability to deal with society depends on who you want to pin the blame on. His environment/parents (or lack thereof), or him for not realizing his shortcomings and working to address them. I don't know the specifics, but the Army taught me at least one really important thing (other than how to disassemble an M16) and it's that you're responsible for everything in your own life. Once you stop blaming the outside world for your own shortcomings, you can make yourself a better person.

Blah, anyway, credit rating is your worth as far as the financial institutions are concerned. Most people have no clue what someone else's credit rating is... it's private information. In fact, most people don't know their own rating... you have to send off for it and you can only get it for free once a year... plus there are 3 ratings companies so you'd have to send off to 3 places for a full overview. That's once per year free per company. Anyway, it's a pain in the ass... I've never done it, I have no idea what my credit rating is, except I get really good offers on stuff that depends on credit rating, so it's probably pretty good.

Theres a writing here in Estonia on the Chapel wall of Virgin Mary:

"Everything i have given has stayed with me,
Everything i have withheld has left me."

Whoever wrote that was a genious, its just a pity that people fail to understand what it means.

Social convenvience to me means that a person has failed to be a human and has become somekind of a drone.