Living on Love, Buying on Time

...without somebody nothing ain't worth a dime. Classic country anyone? Well, this song kinda struck a chord with what has been on my mind since last night. Travis and I took the kids to the haunted house and then out for ice cream. Since the girls had their boyfriends around, everyone wanted to linger so the big guy and I decided to peruse Gander Mountain and Best Buy. We are not shoppers and last night we remembered why. With our limited, now reduced to one income household, we don't have two nickels to rub together after we pay the bills, and to be quite honest that paying the bills part is skating on thin ice at this point as well. We pipe dreamed about getting the kids each a laptop, looked at the Nikon D80 that I've been drooling over and price checked the PS3 that Kullen is chomping at the bit over and wondered how other people do it. Not that we don't understand that our income is much more limited that that of many of our peers, but still with such prices we wondered how people afforded to have so much - 2 or 3 game systems, laptops for every member of the family, surround sound, satellite radio, cable television. (Believe me, we are by no stretch of the imagination deprived.) Suddenly I had a revelation. Most of those people that have all these "things" are buying them on credit. The toys they play with aren't even owned outright. Frustratingly, we also realized that this culture of credit has driven up the prices to the point that cash paying customers such as ourselves are paying way more than we would have otherwise.
A very similar thing is happening not only in our nation, but in the world economy and I realize, it's all going down the crapper.
How's that for your daily ray of Susie Sunshine?!?
Seriously, without credit card debt, owning both of our vehicles outright and only our mortgage, utilities and medical expenses after insurance I realize that no matter how bad our 'credit' rating is, we are far better off than a lot of people. We'll likely at least die debt free. How many Americans can say that?