What's Really Wrong with America?

It's easy for us to blame the government, big corporations, lenders, and CEO's for the predicament we find ourselves in and most of us do, but let's take a little closer look at this situation we've found ourselves in and look a little closer to home. It seems to me that blaming these people for where we're at is a little like blaming the drug dealers for the drug problem. After all they were only giving people what they wanted, easy credit and affordable housing. I think maybe where they made the mistake was making it all too easy to walk away from these obligations once we had committed to them. It seems to be an epidemic in America of people not taking responsibility for their own actions, and trying to lay the blame on someone else when things go bad. It's much to easy to blame our problems and shortcomings on other people, or our parents, or the government, or any other convenient scapegoat we can find.

It's time we as a nation started acting like Americans again and not like a bunch of spoiled brats, always expecting someone else to bail us out when the going gets tough. America was built by people who understood that hard work and self sacrifice are sometimes required to achieve any goal worth achieving and that's what it's going to take to keep this nation going and get out of the slump we're in now. We can't stand back and expect the government to do it for us we all have to do our part to pitch in and make it work.

The home mortgage crisis is a prime example of this, and all you have to do is look around you to see what's caused this. I live in a small subdivision with small homes and when we moved in they were still building the houses around us. Young couples like us who were just starting out and buying their first house bought most of them. And also like us they were approved under the first time homebuyer's plan with the FHA, which made it easier for them to qualify for a loan. Sounds like the American dream right? Well it could have been, but a large portion of those houses are either now in foreclosure or have been previously foreclosed on. We're still here and have never missed a house payment, and I ask myself what separates us from the other couples who have lost their homes?

We have houses on all three sides of us that have been foreclosed on, and all three were young couples around our age or a little younger and the rest of the neighborhood is speckled with empty foreclosed houses. The reasons most of these people lost their houses wasn't that they were laid off or they had an illness in the family or some other such unavoidable calamity. No it was because these people did not make paying their house payment a priority, instead they would rather buy a new motorcycle, ATV, a nice new car or go out drinking every weekend like they were still single. They were not willing to make the sacrifices that were necessary to be a homeowner and a responsible adult.

My wife and I on the other hand realized that to make this work it was going to take sacrifices and a lot of hard work. We both were fortunate enough to have parents who had taught us these values and I am very thankful for that. Sure we made mistakes just like every other young couple does, our biggest one was credit cards. In our first years of marriage we managed to amass almost $70,000 in credit card debt. A lot of this was accumulated when we decided that we my wife was going to go back to college and finish her degree. We leaned heavily on them in those years, because even though we she was working full time and going to school we still needed extra money to get by. Those were tough years for both of us because we were both working full time and she was either at work, in school, or driving to one or the other most of the time. I had to try to keep everything going around the house as far as laundry, house work, yard work, etc. But we made it and once we had met that goal we decided our next was to pay off all of our unsecured debt.

It would have been easy at the time to just file bankruptcy and not pay back all that money but we couldn't bring ourselves to do that. We had borrowed the money and it only seemed right we should pay it back. We called a Consumer Credit Counseling group and they set us up a payment plan that would have everything paid off in 5 years, we now have 8 months left. For the past 4 years we have been sending $1,600 a month (about half our monthly income) to them which they distribute among our credit cards. We have to make this payment in addition to our house payment, car payment and all the usual bills. It was not an easy road and we have both sacrificed a lot along the way but it is a great feeling to be where we are today and I think it has really built a lot of character and pride for us both. We put off having children until we knew we could afford them and we now have our first and by the time she is a year and a half we will be completely out of debt. It took 4 years of scrimping, doing without, and doing everything we could to make a little extra money. Neither one of has a high paying job and I only make a fairly decent wage because I have stuck with the same job for 14 years, even though there have been many times I have wanted to quit. I have worked second jobs, cut grass for my neighbors and coworkers with a push mower, started an eBay business, and worked overtime. We both stopped smoking which saved us in more ways than one, cut back to basic cable, I learned to cut my own hair, and we clip coupons and buy in bulk. I drive a truck that is 15 years old and learned to do all the maintenance on it myself.

I guess the point is we do what it takes and I think our country, as a whole would be a lot better off if everyone could do this. I'm not saying there aren't families out there who have for unavoidable reasons have their homes. And my family has been very lucky in a lot of ways but we have also made our own luck whenever possible. Think about this the next time you lay all the blame on the government and I know if we can all do our part we can make this country great again.