Quart - Squeezed why our families cant afford America

Michelle Belmonts debt haunted her. It was almost unspeakable, but it was a raw relief when anyone asked her about it. She wanted people to hear about her life as she lived it, how her debt trailed her like a childs monster, how it was there when she went to the supermarket, to her sons day care, and home to her one-bedroom apartment.

It began as it often does, with the student loans for the college her parents back home in Georgia thought would ensure the right future. Then there was the money she borrowed for her masters of library science degree. A bit later, when baby Eamon came along, she and her husband owed over $20,000 in hospital bills as well. What was shocking were the price tags, just for normal things, like Michelles labor and her overnight stay. She had required a few days extra at the hospital: Eamon had been born weighing ten pounds, thirteen ounces, and she had pushed that hefty creature for five hours.

I thought that insurance helps you get by, Michelle told me. But my husband had a really cheap insurance, and you get what you pay for.

Then the debt shadow monster just grew. Eamon developed a fever of 103 degrees and had to go back to the hospital. There were two years of surgeries. The bills piled up on the kitchen table. Michelle tried to pay them off, for fear of getting refused treatment later, but then she stopped opening the envelopes. They were different colors. They demanded payment now or legal action, in screaming capital letters. She saw herself on trial, in court, explaining why she had nothing in her account. Her debt was six figures and growing.

The couple had struggled before they had their baby, Michelle said, but then it got astronomically insane after Eamon was born. We always had money for food before, but now its, How are we going to eat? Ill borrow from one credit card bill to pay that other credit card bill. I cant find rent money each paycheck, and we make a decent salary between us.

Michelle Belmont was fighting to stay middle-class. She hoped to train herself into a career of certitudeto become a technological librarian, to set up her future. But the costs were beyond what she ever imagined, and she grew more vulnerable. Meanwhile, the squeeze tightened. The Belmonts lived in a modest one-bedroom apartment in Minneapolis that she and her husband paid $1,300 per month to rent. Minneapolis, with its supposed hipster status and so-called Midwest Modern food and furniture and textiles, was only getting more expensive for Michelle. When I first spoke to her, it seemed unlikely that the Belmonts would ever be free of debt.

That requires nothing bad to happen, Michelle said, almost laughing.

But bad things do happen.

When I first spoke to Michelle, her concerns were not abstract to me. Back then, I had recently given birth to my daughter. And it wasnt until I had my own child that I quickly realized that I too had entered the falling middle-class vortex. My girl was born face-firstsunny-side up, as they sayher unblinking stare promising new joy and terror. Her cries soon became the soundtrack of the anti-romantic comedy of our lives. My husband and I wound up with an unexpected $1,500 bill after her birth that we hustled to pay; most Americans owe even more, an average of around $5,000. Although we managed to avoid the financial perils that many of the people you will meet in this book experiencedpartly because of the wonder of having a New York City rent-stabilized apartmentwe did go through a few years of fiscal vertigo. We had been freelance writers for most of our careers, but by the time my daughter arrived this was no longer a stable line of work for the majority of its practitioners, including us. And now we had day-care costs and hospital bills. We started to search for jobs with regular pay, regular hours, and health insurance.

My husband was already fifty, and it turned out that our years of relative libertyof doing what we lovedhad finally exacted a price. When our daughter was four months old, it got even worse. We first hired a nearly full-time sitter and most of my own take-home earnings as an editor went directly to her. Eventually, my earnings also flowed to my daughters cheerfully boho day care (even though, paradoxically, all the caregivers were most likely themselves just scraping by, despite their loving and primary-color-bright attentions). Again, given the larger field of suffering, our familys worries were relatively low-key. But still we yearned for more of a social mesh to keep us afloat. At the time, we felt like startled nocturnal animals. Subsidized day care had done so much for us. And how much would it have done for people who did not have as many choices as we did?

Eventually, my husband found a full-time editorial job, and so did I. Perhaps not so coincidentally, mine was as director and editor of a journalism nonprofit devoted to supporting reporting on inequality by a good number of reporters who had themselves fallen on truly hard times. I continue to spend my days editing these narratives.

Through these full-time positions, our family was saved from tumbling out of our class positionat least for now. But even after we found ourselves in momentary safety, I couldnt shake the self-blame. Despite our encroaching middle age, we had not planned ahead, I thought. I felt juvenile, but also suspected that the game was riggedthat unlike me, the very wealthy who now filled the city of my birth and worked in finance didnt lacerate themselves for small missteps.

This personal experience was partly how I arrived at what was to become the mantra of this book: Its not your fault. It seems key to meto recognize that feeling in the red or on the edge isnt all your personal problem. And while some psychological analysis or boosts may help, the problem of not being able to afford to live in America cant be cured by self-help mantras. It cant be mended simply by creating a rsum that utilizes several colors of printer ink or a regimen of cleansing green juices. The problem is systemic.

Squeezed is the story of this psychological and socioeconomic predicament. Being squeezed involves ones finances, ones social status, and ones self-image. The middle class I refer to in these pages is a group defined by more than just money: it also leans on credentials, education, aspirations, assets, and, of course, household income. In the United States, the middle class is the group of working people who, according to a May 2016 Pew survey, with a yearly household income for a family of three ranging from $42,000 to $125,000 in 2014, make up 51 percent of U.S. households. Michelle Belmont and her family were in the middle class, and they were squeezed.

The middle-class families running furiously and breathlessly just to find themselves staying in place are a large and varied coterie. It includes highly educated workers like lawyers, professors, teachers, and pharmacists, professionals who never expected to be in this situationoften feeling cast aside by a system that seems stacked against them. Their prospects for the future, given the rise of robots and automation within their professions, which you will read about later in this book, are likely to dim even further.

According to a Washington Post/Miller Center poll, 65 percent of all Americans worry about paying their billsas the parents Ive interviewed, murmuring anxiously at their dining room tables, can attest. One reason for this anxiety is that middle-class life is now 30 percent more expensive than it was twenty years ago; in fact, in some cases the cost of daily life over the last twenty years has doubled. And the price of a four-year degree at a public collegeone traditional ticket to the bourgeoisieis nearly twice as much as it was in 1996. The cost of health care has almost doubled in that twenty-year period as well. And rent, not to mention homeownership, has also become substantially more expensive, though not quite to the same horrifying level as education and medical care. Meanwhile, the ongoing decimation of unions and employees rights continues, with pensions and minimal benefits fading. Unstable working hours are increasingly common too, making child care, always a high personal expense for families, all the harder to arrange and even more expensive while further testing family cohesion. And the squeeze on the middle class has an element of gender bias as well. Its no accident that many of the people youll meet in this book are female. Although there are other reasons why so many of the characters of