Carol H Tucker Passionate about knowledge management and organizational development, expert in loan servicing, virtual world denizen and community facilitator, and a DISNEY fan
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beladona Memorial Be warned:in this very rich environment where you can immerse yourself so completely, your emotions will become engaged -- and not everyone is cognizant of that. Among the many excellent features of SL, there is no auto-return on hearts, so be wary of where your's wanders...
Remember when you were a kid, and you groused “when I grow up no one is going to make me ___________.....”. Fill in the blank – go to bed early. Or eat stuff you don’t like. Or work where you don’t want. Or do a job you don’t like. Or …. well you get the gist of it. When you grew up and started working, no one was going to tell you how to spend your money and you were going to live where you wanted to and buy everything you wanted. Sure your parents said that “money didn’t grow on trees”, but if you were working, then you would have money, right?
And it doesn’t work that way, now does it, unless you are born in the 1%. Perhaps the first inkling was when the money from your part-time job became food on the table for the family instead of spare change in your pocket. Perhaps the first gut check was when you were thinking about going to college, and then you found out where you could actually afford. Somewhere along the line, you realized that your income was going to limit your outgo.
But hey, you are getting up and working hard every day. Life goes on, and you want nice things. You want to be able to buy furniture, tech, clothing, toys. You want to be able to go on vacation, give presents to your friends and family, take trips. So you turn to credit cards. It starts out simple, you are getting a bonus so you decide to take a trip and you put it on the card because you can pay it off right away. The car needs repairs and you put it on the card. The cat needs to go to the vet and you put it on the card. You go shopping and buy new clothes, and you put it on the card. At first, you manage to pay the card down to $0 each month, then you start carrying a balance for a couple of months, then suddenly you realize you cannot pay off the debt and can barely handle the monthly payments – credit card debt has become a supplement to your salary. And maybe you are late on one card, and your rate goes sharply up. Once a rate goes up, it never goes back down, did you know that? The other cards see this and suddenly all your credit cards are high rates and the chance of you ever getting the principal reduced is almost nil….
And what happens if you get sick? What happens if you lose your job? What happens if someone else needs your help? You start worrying about money, about what will happen when you cannot make a payment on the credit cards, or the car, or the house/apartment. You try to cut back, but everyone has emergencies that crop up and everyone has dagnabbit moments. and the card balances keep growing. You think about bankruptcy. And you just get flummoxed because you are working, you are doing everything you can and yet you are still starting to have to make choices that impact your daily quality of life: Between paying for prescriptions or going to the dentist. Between stocking the freezer with food and paying the auto insurance. Between getting the cat care and getting a test done on yourself.
And you look back and wonder what happened…..
You know that you are not alone. You know only the 1% live lives without this happening to them. But you don’t know what to do or how to fix it so that working for a living lets folks live.
CEOExpress
