HC (artist’s conception)
This is probably a parody. This has to be a parody. No one can be this self-unaware, can he?
But then, it seems like a tremendous amount of work for a parody, and to what end? It’s not like the author has the reach of the Onion, or even of the Fargo-Moorhead Observer.
Or does his sponsor, Care One Credit, really want to associate itself with someone so hopelessly profligate?
This month’s honoree is Our Debt Blog, which you can tell from its title alone is yet another in the endless revue of diaries empty of content and incorrectly labeled as personal finance blogs. We’ve reached the tipping point; the people who yammer in blog form about their debt now outnumber those don’t. There are 3.5 billion of the former, and just under 3.5 billion of the latter. Financial responsibility, it was nice knowing you.
What makes the Our Debt Blog founder different is his brazenness. From a few weeks ago:
As most of you know I’m 33 and extremely materialistic. I have to drive a luxury brand. I have to have the latest and greatest gadgets. I think I’m the only PF blogger out there who just loves stuff. I often wonder if there’s something wrong with me but this is who I am. Even growing up as a kid I loved collecting stuff. I had an amazing coin collection. I also collected key chains, stamps, sports cards and other stuff I’m too ashamed to mention here.
Today I have another addiction I need to confess. I love collecting watches. I often wonder why I have to have so many watches:
First of all, Ace, speak for yourself. Plenty of us, at least the materialistic miscreants at Control Your Cash, “love stuff”. What we don’t love is taking possession of it, or even entertaining the notion of doing so, if we can’t afford it.
He had an “amazing” coin collection, and a stamp collection, yet somehow attracted a woman. If anything, that’s what he should be blogging about. “HS” (use your real name, coward) also has the charming habit of thinking that the “$” that precedes a number is just a null sign. His blog is peppered with phrasing such as “$150 dollars”, which is pronounced “one hundred and fifty dollars dollars”. From his “About Us” page:
This blog has been a great experience and I hope it inspires others to get out of debt.
Oh, you filthy and reprehensible liar. The blog has been an awful experience, at least on the reader side, and you don’t hope it inspires others to get out of debt. Exactly what inspiration would even the most gullible of readers get from this?:
I think we are about to do something stupid. We are planning to have an In Vitro fertilization procedure done this month. As some of you know, the wife’s biological clock is ticking and I really want a baby, boy or girl I really don’t care at this point.
The cost for this procedure is somewhere around $16,000 dollars!!
If you’re tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and you’re physically incapable of having a child, give thanks to God for the gigantic favor He’s doing you.
Yes, that’s a lot of money and money that, as you probably already know we don’t have. Over the last two years we’ve spent most of our savings (10 to 15k). We’ve charged up the credit cards again and we can’t seem to control our spending. The income is good but it just becomes a number in bank account that comes and goes.
That sounds like the kind of responsible adult who should reproduce and be accountable for the care and upkeep of another human being, doesn’t it? Wait, here’s the punchline to one of the most hilarious if unconventional standup routines we’ve ever heard:
It feels like most of this reckless spending over the last couple of years has been due to infertility.
Did you catch that? It’s not having a kid that costs money, it’s not having a kid that costs money. HS spends money to assuage the pain of being childless. He continues:
I simply cannot take it anymore and part of me knows this is not going to work. So the plan is go in to more debt and see what happens.
Just…nothing. There’s no comment we can make that’s caustic or vitriolic enough to point out the stupidity of that line any better than the line itself does. It continues. Oh GOD does it continue:
I’m looking at this as a new car I’m not going to buy or that next vacation we’re not going to take. My only fear is that we won’t conceive, we will have more debt and once again go crazy and spend money we don’t have in order to heal some of the pain and stress infertility can cause.
Our blogger will “go crazy” and continue to spend recklessly because he’s an emotional plane crash. We’re not sure which spouse is the infertile one; whether it’s Mr. HC’s sperm that isn’t working, or Mrs. HC’s cervix that’s barren. But before they go the in vitro route, instead they should try implanting a fertilized egg up Mr. HC’s clearly discernible vagina.
If America is indeed on the verge of collapse, or lack of global prominence, there are several factors to blame. An overly regulated economy, a populace that’s more interested in gratification than in principles, etc. But there’s one that doesn’t get anywhere near enough attention – Americans’ propensity to treat the first-person singular pronoun like a chew toy. Every other word of Our Debt Blog is “I”, “me”, or some variant. As a rule, the less one has to say, the more he needs to wrap it around himself.
Speaking of conserving resources, it’s time for us here at CYC to take our own medicine and reduce our consumption of these fruitless, insulting, counterproductive blogs. Reading them gets the systolic number way into the red zone. Time to cut back, and read them less often until the pressure subsides.
Trent Hamm at The Simple Dollar, we owe you an apology. You may be fastidious about unimportant things, but at least you’re not parading your debt around for everyone to see, and then adding to it in the process. Frugality, no matter how extreme, beats the asininity of this month’s Retard of the Month any day of the week.
P.S.: HC has an emergency fund, the simpleton’s counter to investing. An emergency fund, because whatever situation he’s in now is something other than an emergency.
