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[Vector]

My family's been preparing for this for a long time.

I've never lived in a time when new shoes weren't a really, really big deal, or a trip to the doctor's, or medication, or buying a book for anything more for a dollar.  I remember being the only kid I saw in elementary school with big holes in all of my t-shirts.  On trips we'd eat almost nothing but beans from a can, raisin bran, apples, bananas, and peanut butter sandwiches.  For weeks.  Well, that and whatever wild berries we could find to eat.  If we can't find a camping site, we often just pull up somewhere in our car, fall asleep, and hope the cops don't find us.  When I was a little kid and my mom thought I might have lice, she washed my hair with vinegar.  We use almost no cleaning products...

The furniture in my room right now is almost all stuff my parents have been saving since I was 5 years old, so that I'd have a little something when I went to college.  I don't own towels... just some little washcloths.  My mother has passed down the secret of repairing zippers missing teeth, a piece of "women's lore" from the Great Depression.

Recently, my father said he felt rich because he owned enough blankets that he wouldn't have to feel cold at night, and socks that didn't have holes.  He can still tell the time by the sun due to all the years he spent doing manual labor for the park service.  Used to be within five minutes.  He's still got a tan heavy enough that folks think he's Arab.

My grandfather, the mathematician, was so poor that he grew up eating dock (a kind of plant) out of the ditches.  Friends of my mother's received nothing but a single pair of pants; that was their Christmas gift, because nothing else was affordable.

I want my family to be able to experience something other than this.  I'm scared we're going to go back to what we used to have, before all this.

[Lysabild]

"

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact

Use it! I did.

"Please raise the damn debt ceilling.

The rest of the world needs USA to not screw themselves over.

Greetings from a young Dane."

You glad now?! xD

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

My family's been preparing for this for a long time.

I've never lived in a time when new shoes weren't a really, really big deal, or a trip to the doctor's, or medication, or buying a book for anything more for a dollar.  I remember being the only kid I saw in elementary school with big holes in all of my t-shirts.  On trips we'd eat almost nothing but beans from a can, raisin bran, apples, bananas, and peanut butter sandwiches.  For weeks.  Well, that and whatever wild berries we could find to eat.  If we can't find a camping site, we often just pull up somewhere in our car, fall asleep, and hope the cops don't find us.  When I was a little kid and my mom thought I might have lice, she washed my hair with vinegar.  We use almost no cleaning products...

The furniture in my room right now is almost all stuff my parents have been saving since I was 5 years old, so that I'd have a little something when I went to college.  I don't own towels... just some little washcloths.  My mother has passed down the secret of repairing zippers missing teeth, a piece of "women's lore" from the Great Depression.

Recently, my father said he felt rich because he owned enough blankets that he wouldn't have to feel cold at night, and socks that didn't have holes.  He can still tell the time by the sun due to all the years he spent doing manual labor for the park service.  Used to be within five minutes.  He's still got a tan heavy enough that folks think he's Arab.

My grandfather, the mathematician, was so poor that he grew up eating dock (a kind of plant) out of the ditches.  Friends of my mother's received nothing but a single pair of pants; that was their Christmas gift, because nothing else was affordable.

I want my family to be able to experience something other than this.  I'm scared we're going to go back to what we used to have, before all this.

:/ I don't even work and would be able to afford your whole fucking family better food for half my income. It's not fair at all.

[RedKing]

I'm still not sure it's going to be that drastic, but yeah...growing up raised by two Depression-era survivors? Can't help but think a little bit about it. Two main differences though:

1. We don't live on a farm. Probably a negative thing.
2. I don't have 12-15 kids to raise. Definitely a positive thing. (Unless I did live on a farm, in which case...hey, cheap manual labor.)


I think of all those rows of Mason jars that we painstakingly canned each and every year in the fall. We laid up green beans like they were vintage wines. They hung onto jars of corn and squash from 1977 until I finally forced them to get rid of them.

I think about the shirt that my grandmother made for me out of a couple of old feedbags. I think about the fact that I couldn't do that if my life depended on it.

I guess the biggest thing I think about is that I'm happy neither of them lived to see the whole country (potentially) thrown into the shitter AGAIN because of greed and short-sightedness.

[Vector]

I'm thinking right now about my father's family, where my grandmother and grandfather ended up fighting over the money it would take to afford tampons.

I'm also thinking about my step-grandmother, who grew up in Nazi Germany and has no fewer than four refrigerators stuffed with food.  She refuses to buy cat litter because of the expense, and uses cut up newspapers instead.  When she came here in her thirties, she had candy for the first time and went a bit nuts over it.  Then she worked herself so hard that the doctors said she was going to put herself in a wheelchair in a couple years if she kept it up.

My grandmother has walls of canned food in her house.  She grew up during the Depression.

And yeah, my family still doesn't buy things like jam.  We make it ourselves.

[RedKing]

My wife's grandmother used to hoard cans of tuna in her bathtub. Like, the entire bathtub filled with canned tuna. She didn't eat tuna. She didn't have cats. I think that was one of those cases where the Depression-survivor packrat ethos dovetailed with a bit of dementia.

I definitely inherited the packrat thing. I have enough computer parts to build six more functional systems. Granted, most of them would be 486's or early Pentiums running Windows 95, but....y'know, if we ever need to rebuild the Internet from scratch....

[Nadaka]

I don't own a gun right now, all of the families guns went with my father during the divorce and my stepfather traded his .38 special from his police officer years for a washer and drier. Not only do I not own a gun anymore, but it has been close to 2 decades since I have done any kind of hunting. I also do not own any rural property to farm, and I have not done that for over 15 years either.  If things go very very badly, I don't have a way to feed myself if the economy completely self destructs.

I know that is probably something a little to extreme for me to worry about, but that doesn't help someone who grew up in destitute poverty and fears that those could be the good years in my life

[SalmonGod]

If things get as desperate as you guys are describing, food will be my second concern.  I'll have a parental obligation to rob pharmacies for insulin.

[Heron TSG]

I sent a message to the white house, too. Also, my basement is nothing but a huge room packed with shelves of home-canned foodstuffs. My parents didn't grow up in the depression, but their parents passed that on to them.

[freeformschooler]

You guys make me feel unprepared.

I have $400 to my name and my family does not stockpile a lot of food, and we don't have experience living off the land (except for my dad).

[RedKing]

I don't see things getting that bad. Think of it as "The Great Depression, but with Prozac". Things will probably be a bit unstable for a while till the effects really ripple through. Unforunately, those "ripples" are probably going to involve layoffs and foreclosures as interest rates go up. Most people already live one to two paychecks from total disaster in this country, and are leveraged to the gills in debt. When the interest rate on that debt goes up even 1%....there's not a lot of room to accomodate those higher payments.

When it all shakes out, you'll have the plutocrats, who will still be up there because most of them have more than enough assets to handle the shock. You'll have a rump middle class of people who basically never got into debt or had already paid off al their debts and had money salted away in savings and bonds. And you'll have a significantly larger lower class. And probably an underclass of people who are just totally wiped out and living under a bridge somewhere. Several years back, I'd have said that we were close enough that we could probably make that jump and remain in the middle class. $40K of student loans, a house and two children later....not so much.

[Vector]

I definitely inherited the packrat thing. I have enough computer parts to build six more functional systems. Granted, most of them would be 486's or early Pentiums running Windows 95, but....y'know, if we ever need to rebuild the Internet from scratch....

Haha, my mom used to try to figure out something to do with those strings you find in bananas.  She'd go "If I were really smart, I'd know what to do with these!"


I'm kind of worried about my friends who didn't grow up the way I did.  Some of them are going to be extremely upset if they have to tighten their belts.  They aren't mature enough to deal with the situation.

I say that knowing that I am going to be upset, but I also have been living with this hanging over me for, like, ever.  So I've never said anything like "I don't want to be alive if I can't have all my shiny toys."

[Max White]

Well, everybody that has a grasp on the economy, what do you think this will cause to happen to the cost of rental living? In fact the cost of houses in general?

[Nadaka]

Well, everybody that has a grasp on the economy, what do you think this will cause to happen to the cost of rental living? In fact the cost of houses in general?

It will go up, a lot.

[Max White]

Well, kudos then! With about 1.9 million AUS invested in rental properties, I was looking for the 2.0 mark!
Carry on, you crazy economy, causing suffering for all in your wake to all but those who are already too well off for their own good.

[mainiac]

Well, everybody that has a grasp on the economy, what do you think this will cause to happen to the cost of rental living? In fact the cost of houses in general?

Normally, a sudden economic contraction would almost certainly lead to a decline in housing prices and this would have an effect on rental prices.  However the housing market is already severely depressed right now and the pace of both residential and commercial construction is very slow.  Thus I'm not sure if the market can get any more spooked then it is right now.  I suppose that if household balance sheets get even worse then there could be a new wave of foreclosures that could potentially make things worse, but that's pretty speculative because this is pretty far into no mans land.  I very much doubt that prices are going to go up without something unprecedented happening.