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Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

It seems like people, especially Americans and their pathologic relationship to „credit scores“, love spending above their means and taking out loans they can barely pay back if at all. Then they act surprised, as if they are the victims of an unjust world: Student loan debt? Where did that ever come from? 2 cars? Huge house? Maybe an apartment and public transport would habe been better.

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One of the families profiled had a daughter who died after 7 years fighting cancer, and the wife also had a (successful) fight with cancer. Medical costs are the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the US.

As for cars vs. public transport: In most of the US, public transport is not a time-efficient way to get to work, if it even goes from home to work. Having one car per working adult is the thriftier move, after accounting for having access to a greater number of jobs and being able to work longer hours because transport will be quicker.

This is the United States of America. Public Transportation costs more money than a car does once you do a proper TCO, and similarly most urban apartments cost way more than a modest house does on that same metric. Obviously there's always an exception to every rule, but the honest-to-goodness most-fiscally-responsible thing you can do here for 80%+ of regular folks, is to own an efficient vehicle (one per adult) and to own a house (one per household).

And that's before even getting into Student Loans + Medical Debt, the two actual real-world largest causes of American financial instability.

But a lot of people have to have that $25k+ shiny car over the perfectly serviceable 10-year-old economy transporter for a third of the price.

Only a third of vehicles purchased are new. It has been this way for decades.

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