It suggests in the link below that the average American family is at least $16,000 dollars in dept and that does not include your mortgage. We owe on average $8,800 bucks on our credit cards. At the same time they suggest we should have between six and eights months of savings to carry us through losing a job or catastrophic costs of an unexpected nature.

If this is true we are simply a mirror to corporate America and just as fiscally irresponsible as they are. We are living way higher on the hog than we deserve to be. This is a game of "pretend" we all play that allows corporations to allow us to pretend we have lots of money so we don't have to use it and they pretend to give us pretend money we don't need [credit} to buy things so we can pretend to be better off than we really are. America is the "pretend richest" country in the world. If we actually lived within our means and personal dept was eliminated our standard of living would be shockingly lower. We even put our grandchildren in dept so we can pretend we are fat cats.

Is this capitalism gone wild or business as usual? What can we do about this? We complain about the government spending money it doesn't have but what about us?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/28040290#28040290