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Thread: Being Heavily in Debt Is Also Bad for Your Health: Poll

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    Default Being Heavily in Debt Is Also Bad for Your Health: Poll

    Being Heavily in Debt Is Also Bad for Your Health: Poll
    The stress from deepening debt is becoming a major pain in the neck —and the back and the head and the stomach — for millions of Americans.

    When people are dealing with mountains of debt, they're much more likely to report health problems, too, according to an Associated Press-AOL Health poll. And not just little stuff; this means ulcers, severe depression, even heart attacks.
    istock
    Paying Bills
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    Take Edward Driscoll, 38, of Braintree, Mass. He blames debt —$10,000 worth — for contributing to his ulcers and his wife Kimberly's panic attacks. "Just worrying, worrying, worrying, you know, where the next payment of this is going to come from," he says.

    Although most people appear to be managing their debts all right, perhaps 10 million to 16 million are "suffering terribly due to their debts, and their health is likely to be negatively impacted," says Paul J. Lavrakas, a research psychologist and AP consultant who analyzed the results of the survey. Those are people who reported high levels of debt stress and suffered from at least three stress-related illnesses, he says.

    That finding is supported by medical research that has linked chronic stress to a wide range of ailments.

    And the current tough economic times and rising costs of living seem to be leading to increasing debt stress, 14 percent higher this year than in 2004, according to an index tied to the AP-AOL survey.

    Among the people reporting high debt stress in the new poll:

    27 percent had ulcers or digestive tract problems, compared with 8 percent of those with low levels of debt stress.
    44 percent had migraines or other headaches, compared with 15 percent.
    29 percent suffered severe anxiety, compared with 4 percent.
    23 percent had severe depression, compared with 4 percent.
    6 percent reported heart attacks, double the rate for those with low debt stress.
    More than half, 51 percent, had muscle tension, including pain in the lower back.
    That compared with 31 percent of those with low levels of debt stress.

    People who reported high stress also were much more likely to have trouble concentrating and sleeping and were more prone to getting upset for no good reason.

    When their construction business went under four years ago, Pamela Crouch, 61, and her husband, who had retired from General Motors, found themselves struggling under IOUs totaling $30,000.

    "We just kind of felt desperate. We just really didn't have enough to live on to pay what we had to pay," recalls Crouch of Eaton, Ind.

    She remembers having trouble sleeping and concentrating. "We ended up paying a lot of our bills just on the credit card," says Crouch, a medical assistant in a nursing home. "We were stressed and depressed....It was really rough."

    Their son, a manager of a construction supply company, recently helped them out with their debt problems. "Things are doing much better," she says. "It made a world of difference in how we feel."


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    It isn't known for certain whether such stress is causing health problems, says Lavrakas, who while at Ohio State University in the late 1990s helped to develop an index to measure the extent to which people are stressed from financial debts.

    But medical research suggests that most of the symptoms reported in this poll are indeed typical of chronic stress. The body reacts with a "fight-or-flight" response, releasing adrenaline and the stress hormone cortisol. That helps you react fast in an emergency, but if the body stays in this high gear too long, those chemicals can wreak physical havoc in numerous systems — everything from a rise in blood pressure and heart rate to problems with memory, mood, digestion, even the immune system.

    And no, stress doesn't cause stomach ulcers — most are caused by bacteria — but stress can worsen the pain.

    Regardless of the health implications, Americans are taking on more debt as tough economic times — slowing economic activity, job losses, soaring energy and food prices, slumping home values and record home foreclosures — strain many people's budgets.

    Revolving consumer debt, almost all from credit cards, now totals $957 billion, compared with $800 billion in 2004, according to the Federal Reserve.

    Average car loans are up, too, to $27,397, from $24,888 four years ago. Home mortgages total $10.5 trillion, compared with $7.8 trillion in 2004.

    If that's not enough to rattle you, consider this. The share of households' after-tax income that goes to serving financial obligations was nearly 20 percent in 2007, up from 18.5 percent in 2004, said Scott Hoyt, senior director of consumer economics at Moody's Economy.com.

    No wonder people are feeling stressed. So, why do they let debt spiral out of control?

    A significant life crisis like a major health problem or the loss of a job drives many people into debt. Others build up bills "trying to keep up with the Joneses" — according to Patricia Drentea, associate professor of sociology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who studies debt and stress.

    For the middle class and beyond, it could be a push for a bigger house, an SUV, high-tech TVs, computers and other electronic gadgets, gym memberships, nicer clothes and restaurants. The list goes on and on.

    Indeed, the survey found that upwardly mobile, middle-class families were among those who had the most debt stress. Others were women, couples with small children, low-income working families, Democrats and those who graduated high school but haven't taken college courses. Those least likely to be stressed from debt include men, retirees, empty nesters, college graduates and Republicans.

    The AP-AOL Health poll involved telephone interviews with 1,002 adults from all states except Alaska and Hawaii and was conducted from March 24 to April 3 by Abt SRBI Inc. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

    Cynthia Roberts, 36, of Tawas City, Mich., is "slowly crawling out of the hole that I've been buried in for four years." At that time, she lost her job as a convenience store manager as she battled health problems. She eventually lost her home to foreclosure.

    These days, Roberts, a mother of four, the oldest in the Army, makes a living through a series of odd jobs — hauling metal to the scrap yard, selling firewood, mowing lawns and cleaning houses.

    She's now making payments on utility bills and on her car. But not her credit card, where hundreds of dollars in charges are several years old.

    At the height of her financial troubles, "I couldn't function," she remembers. "I'm surprised I'm not in a white straitjacket in a nut house. It was that bad. I had to go for counseling because I was freaking out."

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    Finance related stresses are big contributers to health problems.

    Its also a major contributer to marital problems and divorce.


    Often credit cards are used to stay afloat until a job situation clears up or a new job is found. Also, very often the loss of a job is completely unforeseen.

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    there are some shocking numbers in the article. Like average car loan $27,000 up several thousand over the last couple yrs. (not good)

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    Quote Originally Posted by Topspin View Post
    there are some shocking numbers in the article. Like average car loan $27,000 up several thousand over the last couple yrs. (not good)
    Buying a new car is a waste of money, in my opinion. I learned a long time ago that if you put the car payment into a savings account, you can come up with enough money to buy a decent used car sooner than you think.

    No payments, no interest on the payments, and still have solid reliable transportation.

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    no doubt, I've bought way to many new cars one of my many financial mistakes.
    However I have never spent over $20,000 and only spend $17,000 on the civic I currently have.

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    Tops, if one of us posted this, you'd call us doomers & ask how many business classes we took.

    It's a really annoying schtick, frankly....

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    I post positive and negative stuff oncelor you tool. Darla maybe the only one I can think of less economically astute than you. what this article shows is most of the pain is self afflicted.

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    "what this article shows is most of the pain is self afflicted."

    You're so out of touch that it's laughable.

    Stick with "updates from the investor class"...

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    there's a reason you sell used software. Who's out of touch.
    $10,000 in credit card debt and $27,000 car loans is not self afflicted.
    Your comical lorax, you should have paid attention in college you might be writing the software instead of peddling it.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Topspin View Post
    there's a reason you sell used software. Who's out of touch.
    $10,000 in credit card debt and $27,000 car loans is not self afflicted.
    Your comical lorax, you should have paid attention in college you might be writing the software instead of peddling it.
    Now that is a comment by someone who stays on top of things.

    Have you seen the market for programmers? Its brutal. There are way more programmers than there are jobs for programmers.

    And the credit card debt may or may not be "self afflicted". There are numerous people who just blew money with credit cards. But there are also numerous people who had a job loss or other crisis and the credit card kept them from being homeless.

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    please research average programmers incomes
    and 95% are working, your point about some being unempoyed is obvious but comically irrelevant.

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    leasing isnt to bad. I have a 2008 camary that gets 28mpg that i pay $199 a month for. They keep calling me to buy back my lease early. guess there is a need for the 4bangers with these gas prices.
    Q: Senator Obama, would you take the same pledge? No tax increases on people under $250,000?

    OBAMA: I not only have pledged not to raise their taxes, I've been the first candidate in this race to specifically say I would cut their taxes.

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    leasing is financially way worse than buying, but like I said my actions to follow logic here.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Topspin View Post
    please research average programmers incomes
    and 95% are working, your point about some being unempoyed is obvious but comically irrelevant.
    95% are working?

    Hmmm, I was just reading an article that said:


    "The Programmer's Future

    Will low-cost offshore competition and packaged apps make the in-house programmer obsolete?


    By Eric Chabrow, Chris Murphy, InformationWeek
    Nov. 17, 2003
    URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story...cleID=16100697



    Coding software has been a good living for a half million or more--sometimes far more--Americans during the last decade. Now it's the IT job category that bears the highest unemployment rate, at 7.1% this year. Low-cost global competition and changing technologies have dimmed the career prospects of many programmers in this country and cast the role's future into doubt. To programmers like Kevin Mueller and Garrison Hoffman, these grand economic changes are as personal as a paycheck.

    Hoffman had it made. In the late '90s, he pulled in $80,000 a year programming at a consulting firm that developed systems for pharmaceutical companies. But the paycheck didn't begin to explain the allure of writing code. "It's like working on puzzles for eight, 10 hours a day," Hoffman says. "You're constantly learning, finding new challenges, new riddles. And I got paid for that."

    Not anymore. Hoffman hasn't had steady IT work in two years. He gets by with temporary jobs as a systems administrator and photographer and recently moved from fashionable Park Slope in Brooklyn, N.Y., to nearby Bay Ridge, the more solidly middle-class neighborhood featured in the John Travolta film "Saturday Night Fever."

    Kevin Mueller has it made. His employer, the fast-growing stock exchange Archipelago, lives on business technology. The speed and reliability of Archipelago's electronic-trading platform are the reason traders use it. Mueller works side by side with business-unit managers who know the value of good code. But would he advise a smart 18-year-old to study computer programming? After a long pause: "For the majority of folks, I'd tell them not to do it," he says.

    Even Mueller's best-case scenario of the future is a world with fewer programming jobs. Smart companies will take Archipelago's "software craftsman" approach, he says. Small teams of talented programmers who understand the company work closely with business managers to craft code that solves problems. But Mueller knows many businesses will go the other route, throwing huge programmer teams with layers of project managers at problems. Those are the commodity programming jobs most likely to be shipped offshore. "It's going to be a shrinking field," Mueller says.

    That appears to be what's happening. U.S. workers are exiting the field: From 2000 to 2002, the number of IT pros calling themselves computer programmers dropped more than 12% as 87,000 people walked away from the career. It's no wonder--the number employed dropped 16%. In 2003, there are 3% fewer people employed as programmers than in 1994. Unemployment among programmers averaged 1.6% two years ago, a far cry from 7.1% in the first nine months of this year, the highest of the eight IT job categories tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That unemployment comparison isn't perfect, since the bureau began using new job definitions in 2003, but for both categories the government used monthly surveys counting coders employed by user companies, IT vendors, outsourcers, integrators, and consultancies, plus the self-employed.

    "To me, the outsourcing trend indicates that an ever-larger part of IT work has become routine, repetitive, and low-bandwidth; one might even say unexciting or boring," Simonyi says in an E-mail. Ultra-educated Indian programmers are underutilized, just as programmers have been in this country, he says. He has a stake in this vision, since his company, Intentional Software Corp., develops tools to make it easier to capture the design of software in the actual code. Yet he predicts a long and painful journey. In the near term, the 20% or more least-productive U.S. programmers could lose their jobs to overseas employees. But those jobs will eventually be mechanized, by utilizing the programming skills of senior U.S. people, Simonyi predicts."






    The outlook for programmers is not great. The demand for programmers has dropped. The demand for programmers in this country has dropped even more. Its a career that is not going to get better, it'll get worse.

    The article quotes a figure that means your 95% employment is a little high. But it also mentioned "That appears to be what's happening. U.S. workers are exiting the field: From 2000 to 2002, the number of IT pros calling themselves computer programmers dropped more than 12% as 87,000 people walked away from the career. It's no wonder--the number employed dropped 16%."


    And when people walk away from their career as a programmer, they are no longer included in the figures. So its even worse.

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    Selling old, used software door-to-door is where it's at, baby!

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