Ten years after: Life below the Benz

2018 is the ten-year anniversary of the financial crisis that head-butted the US economy and reverberated through Canada. The abrupt event affected the careers of five friends, four women and one man—and only one has fully recovered.

The New York Times has published a trenchant report, The Recovery Threw the Middle-Class  Dream Under a Benz by Nelson D. Schwartz—recommended even if you think you know the story.

Four friends and two acquaintances lost their jobs then; I first wrote about several in early 2009, here.
(Names were changed.)

Only one, C., secured permanent, employment within the year; the rest worked part time, if at all. Marg just got a full time job after ten years of searching. Rod, who managed large office furniture installations for an office furniture firm, now parks cars on a Hertz lot. Donna, who has an MBA in finance, is in sales for Blinds to Go.

They were "middle class", a cohort defined by income, but median income (usually indexed by location) covers a range. In Canada "middle income" is from $CDN 33,000—$130,000 annually; in the US, the range is from $US 42,000 to $125, 000.

Never mind the earnings, what about expenses and liabilities? Is a person able to live on that net income? As Winston Churchill said. "There are three classes: bored to death, billed to death, worried to death." Half of Canadians say they are within $200 a month of not being able to pay the bills or other debts. That's why income is such an inadequate measure.

When we were young, such precarity was—if not exactly fun—infused with a sense of capacity. But those past 50, battered by the crisis and working like Rob does, in what are called "senior shit jobs", are not feeling resilient. Except for C., they have taken marked drops in income and security.

Because housing and transportation are the biggest expenses for those over 50, they are reviewing their options. Forget the return of box-pleated skirts, sharing living quarters (again) is the next around-again trend.

Some adult children and their parents would rather be dead as Lehmann Brothers before setting up house together. But I think of my grandparents. Each set lived with one other generation, sometimes two, at least for a time.

I think too of Marg, single and childless, in a three-bedroom house she inherited from her mother, who died during her long hiatus. She has an opportunity to add a roommate or two and perhaps enjoy the gifts of connection—an unanticipated bonus.

Last summer I met Genny, a journalist, who shares a two-floor apartment. She's on the first floor, her daughter, her partner and their seven-year-old are on the second. "I am delighted to be so close to them", she told me, "but I would never have asked until I was laid off."

Casting about for solutions, we return to old forms, to family and community, to sharing goods and realizing that a car per person is an inelegant expense. I often wonder, how did prosperity result in a family or a group of friends atomizing? I like my own bathroom, but is that the ultimate luxury?

Schwartz ends with the words of an economist, Diane Swonk, who was profiled in the piece: "The financial crisis became a delineator. There were those who could recoup their losses and those who could not. Some people have amnesia, but we are still living with the wounds.”