Yikes. I have a coworker who is in a very bad financial spot but doesn’t really realize it. Wears $500+ shoes, expensive purses, etc..
She’s been through bankruptcy, has credit cards all maxed again, orders food to be delivered to the office for lunch “so she doesn’t waste her own gas picking it up”, and many more weird justifications. Recently she’s been planning her wedding with her fiancé who “makes over $100k” but they both live with her parents in their basement. She’s 34 and he’s 40. They got in a fight recently because she was looking at a bartender.. he wouldn’t talk to her for 3 days so she bought a $700 pair of jeans for him and now they’re better. He has tons of debt as well and spends the same way.
She started telling me about her wedding the other day and said “Well this is going to be a Hampton Affair”.. which I guess means it’ll be a high-end wedding. She couldn’t afford the flowers so she asked several family members if she could put it on THEIR credit cards and pay them back “twice monthly, some out of each paycheck”. Really, is it worth doing all of this to have your Hampton Affair Wedding?
That’s the worst of it, but there’s more.. She got a phone call from someone in Florida (we’re in Chicago) who said she’s preapproved for a $30,000 car. She was surprised and excited by this call so she worked it out with them and was driving the car only 2 days later. It’s a 2012 Chrysler 300 with every option. She’s paying $30,000 @ 15%. They said all she had to do was pay a down payment of $2000. She didn’t have it so they said “ok we’ll just add $50 to each payment” which was obviously an acceptable solution for her. She said “I felt like a celebrity – they drove it up from Florida and met me at Ohare Airport where we did the paperwork and I drove off with the car”. She said it has every option except no sunroof, so she’s getting that put in aftermarket.
Arghh.. people like this make me think it’s too easy to get bankruptcy. Her filing for bankruptcy didn’t scare her straight, it just relieved the debt temporarily. It seems like stealing to me.