In the summer of 1998, Harper’s Magazine published one of its most talked-about stories, Vince Passaro’s narrative of how his family accumulated $63,000 in credit card debt. He and his wife had academic jobs bringing in a combined $100,000 per year as well as a rent-controlled apartment in New York City, but they also had three children in private school. Passaro attracted opprobrium back then, and the story remains one of the key works of the personal finance confessional genre.
Until Sunday, that is. Edmund Andrews, who covers economics for the New York Times, wrote a story for the magazine about how he dug more than $500,000 into debt because he wanted to buy a nice house for his new blended family, even though much of his $120,000 annual salary was claimed by his ex-wife for alimony and child support.Â
I’m the kind of person who clips coupons and rides the Megabus. While printing presses all over this great land were rolling out Edmund Andrews’s tale of woe, I was at the grocery store loading my cart with $0.88 packs of cream cheese and $2.00 boxes of raisin bran. Then I swung past the Junior League’s annual second-hand clothing sale, where I bought some shirts for my husband and me, just $3.00 each, some still with tags on them. I want to smack Passaro and Andrews around, then pack them into my nine-year old-car and show them what a thrift shop looks like. I want to teach them to make their own pizza dough and mend socks and use tie-dying to turn stained school uniform shirts into fun playclothes. (more…)
This month, Thomas Geoghegan has an article in Harpers about how 
