this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
652 points (98.4% liked)
Greentext
7515 readers
1699 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
tldr, debt is a trap. only when you accept it's a trap does it become a tool
if you want/need more $...learn the value of your labor.
For the vast majority of people the only debt they should ever get is a house.
The average person does not have to financial means to pay for a car or school without loans.
A car is absolutely doable without financing l. It's a poverty trap to finance a car. What you can't do is have a brand new car.
Same with phones. Buy a second-hand flagship from a couple of years ago (eg pixel 8), and use a pre-paid plan.
It's not just a few hundred dollars saved on the phone, it's also a few hundred per year on less overpriced contracts.
Prepaid plans have to be more competitively priced because you can switch at will.
I buy all my phones off eBay from reputable resellers. There are plenty that make a living at refurbishing phones, rate each one on a scale, post pics of the phone you will receive. I pay around $120 for mine, $180 if it's a bangin' deal and I really want that unit.
https://caredge.com/guides/used-car-price-trends-for-2025
https://moneyzine.com/personal-finance/savings-statistics/
... that's as of 2022.
Its worse now, considerably.
But, even assuming 2022 savings levels... that's half the population that would need their savings to multiply by at least a factor of ~x42.5, to be able to afford the average used car, without financing.
... You are wildly, incredibly out of touch.
Sure, yes, its technically possible, technically doable, in approximately the same way that it's technically possible and doable that I could become a millionaire by the end of 2026.
Yep, its a poverty trap to finance a car.
Correct.
... and that is the only viable choice for people in car centric, car dependent American, people who don't have thousands to tens of thousands of dollars in savings, which is the vast majority of people.
In conclusion: America is a poverty trap.
... Metric had a song about this, what, nearly two decades ago?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fYbrb2YYqdo
The average cost of a car is wildly skewed by luxury models and the absurd prices of new cars. The market has gotten more expensive, so it is more difficult to find reliable cars in the sub 5k range, but under 10k is possible. It's possible to save a few hundred bucks a month and get progressively better cars without financing them, because depreciation isn't significant at the low end of the market.
How to skip steps 2-4?
Pay cash for a car that runs. You aren't getting a loan without income in the first place.
That is what I have done, I don't like that debt either and some cunt at the bank getting 2/3rds of my housing expenses is only slightly better than a wanker of a landlord getting all of it.
That is a horrible tldr and completely against the precise and accuracy focused spirit of the poster. Very disingenuous.
A better tldr is lenders are looking at your current and past ability to pay your current, past, and predicted debt and sudden changes to the inputs make sudden changes to the point value, but that smooths out over a relatively short time frame on the scale of your life.
Nothing in that message has anything to do with better wages.
nah, no lender gives a fuck about your financial situation, certainly not in america. bankstreet turned boom and bust investing into an science, nothing has changed there.
for the overwhelming majority of people all debt is a trap, for everyone else...it's still a trap, just a useful one.
It's not really a trap, it's how our current society pools resources to make big things happen. Obviously you can make big things happen through authoritarian means (like pyramids) but in a less authoritarian society, which I think everyone except the lemmy ml folks would say is good, the way you make big things happen is through borrowing money at the lowest possible interest rate. There's a reason the fed rate is such a critical, newsworthy figure in our society -- not just for the us but for many countries.
That's not to say there's not a better way. It's also not to say that credit scores are particularly related. But it's not a trap.