… if you’re five, and your parents just purchased a new fridge (more stuff!), and you have a backyard, and you can play in that box as a playhouse in your backyard of the home your parents bought.  That you live in.  When you’re five.  Instead of the cardboard box used as make-believe.

HOWEVER!

… some people actually live in cardboard boxes, use them as actual shelter.  I see them on the roadsides and freeways, hunched up against buildings.  Quite frightening, actually. 

I do not want to be that person.  That person also tends to eat food that others have eaten and discarded.  Ah!NoDoNotWant.

But by the grace of God, I am what I am {1 Corin. 15:10}

Motivation #3?  Homelessness, and the avoidance thereof.

May have mentioned – Half bought the house I/we/us live in … while house shopping?  Random intersphere calculation kicked back an “affordable” house payment of … [ironic eye/drumroll] $8000, based on combined incomes.

… hahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHhahahahahhahAHAHAHAHHAHAHAH yehnorite.

See?  More buttpluckery from the “masters of mankind” … technically yes the monthly influx of “money” could yes theoretically yes afford a house payment of that magnitude, ridiculousness, and waste … assuming no one ate, or traveled anywhere – including work – or enjoyed electricity …

… but IT’S ON YOU to know that.  Approvability ≠ Affordability well doesn’t that suck. 

Other thing?  “Rates” are low (right now maybe not the future now of an Other Person … question: is time linear or cumulative? Asking for a friend) meaning the “cost” to “borrow” “money” is lower, because the “interest rate” is smaller … the cost of not having cash. 

Because my debt monkey is a Gorilla of Foolishness, Half can’t refinance the house, can’t take advantage of the “lower cost” on the “money” borrowed to get the house, and it’s all my fault.  Again. 

I told Half I would prepare the paperwork/not fight on custody but got shrill in return so HANGING TOUGH that’s my Half [grins stoopitly] we gotta work on being better me … it’s a process.  Like making sausage.

The American economic system relies on debt – or, the total cost to the debtor/borrower of the obligation to repay – but does not make knowledge of the effective management of that debt a priority in the American educational system because there is “money” in the Precariat’s mismanagement of aforementioned debt.

Niiice … but not really. 

So if your parents/guardians/primary caretakers/knowledge-conveyors/life-preparudorians failed at that job, the failures/errors continue for successive generations, ‘cuz no one got the memo, or until someone has an innate sense/understanding/grasp of money = machine and can make that work for their offspring, who pass it along. Maybe.

Money = machine — learn to work the levers or suffer industrial debt.  How much does THAT suck. 

Actually, not too much.