Smile!
We were all set to give this month’s award to Trent Hamm yet again. Trent has made the Financial Retard of the Month his to lose, commandeering it like Bobby Orr did the Norris Trophy and Hank Hill did Strickland Propane’s Employee of the Year. We had Trent’s name on the plaque and were ready to request another acceptance speech that he was doubtless itching to give.
And then, everything changed like a flash of lightning. In the most stunning rally in the brief history of the Financial Retard of the Month honors, Kris at Simple Island Living came from several points down to fire past Trent and all other comers. She first came to our attention with this comment, from another contestant’s recent Carnival of Wealth submission:
I just looked into [food stamps] for our family when I became unemployed. In Hawaii, there is an asset test ($3k in assets or less for a family of 3) you have to pass in order to qualify for welfare like food stamps. The only reason I qualify for state health is because I am pregnant and my son is a minor. If those weren’t the case, I would be shelling out $800 a month for healthcare for the two of us.
The one thing I do disagree with you about is the use of food stamps for organic food. When it comes down to it, getting organic milk for my son is extremely important for me because he is 19 months old. When a child is that young, if it is possible to get milk that is free of hormones it is, to me, one of our higher priorities. It’s just that their bodies are so fragile and while he’s so young, we want him to be as hormone and pesticide free as possible.
Apart from that, if you’re talking millionaires who are on food stamps and getting their organic truffle oil, well then, perhaps a touch of reality would be good for them.
Two paragraphs of why she needs other people to support able-bodied her, followed by an indignant slap at other people who have chosen to do the exact thing she did – take advantage of a political construct that allows the unproductive to flourish on the backs of the productive.
We touched on this in the linked post, but in her position as an unemployed mother of one (with another en route), Kris has chosen to live a gratuitously costly lifestyle that used to be the exclusive province of rich people. It wasn’t that many years ago that insisting on expensive organic milk (by the vernacular definition of “organic”, not the true definition) for your fragile offspring was a symptom of being idly rich. Being privileged enough to find death and mayhem at every turn in the grocery aisle was a status symbol, one that showed you were beyond concerning yourself with philistine worries like simply buying whatever milk was cheap.
But today, you can have discriminating tastes while being on food stamps. It’s the democratization of insanity.
So here we have a woman who collects largesse that’s “free”, without ever thinking about where and from whom the resources originate. On the surface that sounds like an eminent disqualification for blogging about personal finance, but what do we know?
Shame used to be something of a motivating factor for public behavior. Maybe it still is, in some backward and less enlightened parts of the planet. But as for now, impunity reigns supreme. Want to finance an education without estimating its costs and eventual benefits? Why not? If you end up borrowing more than you can ever pay back, demand clemency. Then again, in a society where a corporate executive can run a multibillion-dollar company into the ground and expect (and receive) taxpayer support, or when the political appointees who run the superfluous secondary mortgage market can escape with billions, why shouldn’t a simple housewife spend money on something less vital and more fun than inexpensive supplies for her toddler?
There are millions of leeches in this formerly robust country. What makes her so special?
We’ll let our subject handle it:
We’ve been planning our anniversary trip for a year – saving up for it for two years. Since we were married on Leap Day, my husband decided that very (sic) four years we would take a trip, thereby warding off the stereotypical flowers-dinner anniversary that most anniversaries default into. Since we have a toddler, I tried to think of something that would be toddler appropriate while still being a blast for us. What did I think of? Disney Cruise!
We’ll be setting sail on the Disney Wonder next week. It had a special “kids-sail-free” special going on, which made our balcony room (all included meals) about $2K.
Is it expensive? Sort of. We bought the extra trip insurance because I’m pregnant and we have a toddler – in case the doc had put me on bed rest or something, at least our trip would have been covered. Since we did, though, it comes out to around $350 a day for the 3 of us.
It is a bold departure from our honeymoon trip…We also got tipsy and went to an art auction. Not a good idea. Don’t recommend it. Buh-bye moolah.
Buying stuff with no utility, while drunk. How did we forget to include a chapter on that surefire wealth-building method in Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense?
But in reality, we are excited. Happy to be getting away from my current drama…
Every woman in a similar position seems to have some form of “drama”. Like many of our previous honorees, this month’s is suffering from the shellshock that affects so many of our returning Iraq vets.
Just kidding, of course she isn’t. No, she has a husband and a kid and another on the way. She lives in a place that millions of other people pay good money to visit. Her “drama” consists of not looking too hard to find a job, and then again, why should she seeing as she’s a few months pregnant?
In the paragraph about trip insurance, we’ll assume that she submitted to pronoun confusion and that the $350 a day refers to the cost of the cruise + trip insurance, not just the trip insurance itself. Assuming it’s the former, that means she’s paying $450 in trip insurance. Or as the trip insurance provider calls it, the easiest damn money in the world to make. A gigantic premium for essentially no work and no risk.
And happy to pretend for a second that our life isn’t quickly becoming, well, sort of ghetto (I duct-taped my kids diaper today because it ripped. Is that normal?)
Given the comments and responses to that last line, we’re assuming it’s not hyperbole and that she’s being sincere.
So that’s $2450 for a cruise plus trip insurance. She said she’s going to buy a sombrero, so we’re presuming she’s taking Disney’s week-long Mexican Riviera junket. Which would also entail schlepping the family from Honolulu to Los Angeles and back. Which is probably at least another $1000 or so.
Even better, this post follows up one on her blog entitled “socially acceptable stealing…right or wrong?” She’s talking about company office supplies, etc., but no one mentioned whether going on cruises while sucking at the taxpayer breast qualifies. But it should. It’s clearly stealing, and God knows it’s now socially acceptable.
Trent Hamm became our go-to subject for Financial Retard of the Month because of his pathological attention to the small picture. (His sanctimony, lack of humor and stubbornness were just gravy.) But that being said, he’s worth emulating in every way if the alternative is this. Which is worse – having the wherewithal to lead a comfortable life and refusing to, or having no wherewithal yet overextending yourself to lead the comfortable life anyway? Going on a weeklong cruise while duct-taping diapers. Trent would duct-tape diapers because it’s fun, not because it’d save a few dollars he could then spend on a tiny percentage of a cruise that he shouldn’t be going on anyway because he’s collecting health care and food benefits from his fellow citizens through the conduit of a state agency.
Oh yeah, the award. The February 2012 Financial Retard of the Month honoree is not Kris of Simple Island Living. There’s somebody far more complicit here. It’s you, the American taxpayer. (Assuming you’re among the 80% of our readers who are American, and among the 50% of those who pay taxes.) Congratulations on letting a system that allows this kind of abuse to grow roots, and good luck ever getting it modified. Take a look in the mirror and embrace your retardism. You earned it.
