Spendaholics programme

Never seen that Austin, but it does sound very interesting.

lipidicman -

Apparently someone was pawning their son's stuff to buy him a birthday present - some present!

Sounds absolutely shocking!
But then, to be fair, how many people sell their kids toys at Boot Fairs and Ebay so they can get the money to buy their kids another, new, gift for birthdays/Christmas? With the pawn brokers, there's even still a chance the boy might get it back again; although unlikely.

Magentasue - that woman retained her sense of humour ... from the *high* she was getting from all that fizzy!!! LOL

I remember a similar one, where they young couple were in 'sooo much debt she didn't know what to do' it ended up that they had a loan from a local loan shark and due to the interest etc on it she was never going to pay it back, it was so depressing to watch when all you really wanted to do was help! The worst thing was, the loan was for something ridiculous like a £100, she scraped to pay back £10 per week, and then on went the interest. She was about my age, although she had nipper in tow - they sold the pushchair for a tenner I think (It was a while back) to pay for the weeks money....then never wanted to leave the flat cause it was hard work to carry baby up and down the stairs.

I think there is a huge lesson to be learnt for people when they are young - that you can't have what you want when you want unless you can afford it!!!! Although I do agree with lipidicman - let others spend spend spend and prop the economy up! But I guess we'll all end up paying one or another when it no longer stays up

Magentasue wrote:

I caught another programme last night called 'Skint'. Really depressing about people who live by pawning their possessions only to buy them back at inflated prices. There was a young woman who repaid her credit card debt by lap dancing for which she had to pay the club owner and hand over a percentage of her tips. She was doing brilliantly I thought by retaining her sense of humour. But again, she was shown pushing a supermarket trolley with 8 2litre bottles of fizzy drinks etc etc and laughing at the camera saying she dreaded that checkout moment. Depressing stuff.

I was going to mention this prog as well. The facilities of Pawn shops does nothing but keep these people in the debt hole they are in. It's so sad

MATH wrote:

I was going to mention this prog as well. The facilities of Pawn shops does nothing but keep these people in the debt hole they are in. It's so sad

I know! It's not like they're in big amounts of debt either. For a lot of them (I mean those whose main issue is simply that they are on minimum wage or benefits, rather than those with drug problems or similar) if they just did a bit of Old Styling and gave up on materialism for 2 minutes (well, a couple of months anyway) then they could pay their few hundred quid off for good, and suddenly find themselves never having to pay interest to loan sharks ever again.

I agree. I dropped down to 4.5k a year while I finished my PhD - that is hard to live on. But I cut everything to the bone and managed. I guess it is easier when it is only for a while, for me it lasted only 2-3 years.