For those of you living with minuscule entertainment budgets due to crushing student loan debt (or any other kind of debt for that matter), leaving you chained to Netflix streaming or youtube on the weekends, check out Maxed Out, a 2006 documentary that eerily predicts the collapse of the housing market, and the economy as a whole, after far too many years of access to easy credit. A major portion of the documentary focuses on credit card debt, but it also touches on the real estate bubble, predatory lending tactics employed on college campuses, and interviews with some pond scum, aka "collection agents."
This is not the sort of movie to watch alone at night, since it is quite dark at times (stories of two students with outrageous credit card bills who eventually committed suicide are included), and because we all know what happened just a couple years after the movie was filmed.
On the other hand, there are some lighter moments that highlight just how valuable an education is when it comes to succeeding in the marketplace. Listen closely at about an hour and five minutes in as a real estate broker who doubled her money during the housing bubble describes a "track" home and informs us that the "medium" price of a house is $268,000.
On the other hand, there are some lighter moments that highlight just how valuable an education is when it comes to succeeding in the marketplace. Listen closely at about an hour and five minutes in as a real estate broker who doubled her money during the housing bubble describes a "track" home and informs us that the "medium" price of a house is $268,000.
I wish someone would make a similar documentary based entirely on student loan debt in the U.S. It is truly frightening that many people carry student loan balances equal to or greater than a typical mortgage.
Any other movie suggestions that will keep people like me motivated to pay off their student loans early and stay out of debt permanently?
There is sort of a documentary...Watch "The College Conspiracy" on Youtube. Kinda goes into the Law scam as well.
ReplyDeleteI'll definitely check it out, thanks! I just googled it, and it looks like it's available on youtube. I love when that happens.
DeleteI saw the housing market collapse coming years before it hit. One, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that, when home prices were appreciating at 20%-30% a year while salaries were were increasing at maybe 2%, that affordability would be compromised; even with 0% interest (a fantasy, I know, but play along), at some point, the price of the home will be more than a person can afford to pay. Secondly, this had happened in Europe a few years before it happened in America; Europe had a housing bubble before we did. The only difference was that they were on the same tracks we were, but they were a few miles ahead of us, figuratively speaking. The Economist magazine had a few articles warning us Yanks to watch out. Three, there had been speculative bubbles in the past (the Tulip bubble in 18th Century Holland and the FL land boom of the 1920s come to mind), and they sooner or later come to an end. Why would history be any different here?
ReplyDeleteWhen I raised these points to people, they thought I was crazy; they thought I was stupid. Oh, the price of homes will never go down; they'll only go up forever & ever! Even if a person didn't do more than think about point #1 (the difference in price appreciation vs. salary increases), they should have seen the housing crash coming. Hell, Ray Charles could have seen it coming! Anyway, I bought my house 2-3 years after the market crashed. Even though I'm underwater, at least I didn't buy at the peak like all the suckers did...
It must have been hard to be treated like Chicken Little when in fact, you were right all along. I didn't hear anything about the European housing bubble. Maybe because I had my head stuck in some law school tome?? I hear a lot of people talking about a student loan bubble these days, but I can't get on board with the idea that it's synonymous with the housing bubble. People who are underwater on their homes, or can't afford their mortgages anymore, can always walk away from their houses or do short sales. In many cases, the lenders cannot go after borrowers for deficiencies. But with student loan debtors - we have nothing to give back to the bank, except (in some cases worthless) undergraduate or graduate degrees. Considering some of the numbers I've seen - some estimates are that 1 in 3 student loan borrowers are in default - I think there's an entirely different crisis on the horizon, one that won't leave the banks or borrowers financially intact after the storm clears.
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