Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
It has moved the window of what people regard as middle class behaviours. I used the example of elite sports teams. Spending on sports and recreation for kids has quadrupled in the last 20 years. Who are these people dropping 5k+ a year per kid on intensive sports activities with travel, hotels, etc? It started out as those upper-middle-class, dual-income professional households. But as tends to happen, now the middle-middle-class considers that kind of behaviour to be just a standard part of being Canadian parents, so they've followed suit. Even though they can't really afford it. Maybe it's a downside to the egalitarian pretenses of our society, but fewer people in Canada today seem to recognize that A) there are dramatic differences in income even among families who regard themselves as middle-class, and B) we should tailor our spending to what our income affords us. The question for me isn't so much why people are bad with money. The question is why Canadians have become worse with money than Americans, the British, Dutch, Japanese, Germans, etc.
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Great take.
One thing with people that overspend is there doesn't seem to be any outward consequences. Like, you can see people you
know can't afford things based on what you can calculate for their incomes, yet there they are doing all the things and having all the stuff. I rarely see the house of cards come crashing down like you'd expect. Maybe it catches up with them at retirement age and at 42 I just haven't been around long enough to see the full repercussions manifest? IDK, but I imagine the fact that people can just go on and on in debt seemingly in perpetuity encourages other people to do the same.