The Ferrells have cut back on dance lessons for their twin daughters. Vaccinations for the family’s two cats and two dogs are out. Haircuts have become a luxury.
And before heading out recently to the discount grocery store that has become the family’s new lifeline, Sharon Ferrell checked her bank account balance one more time, dialing the toll-free number from memory.
“Your available balance for withdrawal is, $490.40,” the disembodied electronic voice informed her.
At the store, with that number firmly in mind, she punched the price of each item into a calculator as she dropped it into her cart, making sure she stayed under her limit. It was all part of a new regimen of fiscal restraint for the Ferrells, begun in January, when state workers, including Mrs. Ferrell’s husband, Jeff, were forced to accept two-day-a-month furloughs.
For millions of families, this is the recession: not a layoff, or a drastic reduction in income, but a pay cut that has forced them to thrash through daily calculations similar to the Ferrells’.
Read the whole piece from the front page of Friday’s New York Times.
I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic, because heaven knows I’m have a few financial problems of my own, but this sounds like I remember things being in the supposedly prosperous 50s. It seems to me that things today are probably more “normal” than the wild and woolly free-spending of the last 20-30 years.