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277 points cebert | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.625s | source
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PostOnce ◴[] No.44361768[source]
Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. (not less)

However, instead of using it to buy or construct a machine to triple what you can produce in an hour, the average person is using it to delay having to work that hour at all, in exchange for having to work an hour and six minutes sometime later.

At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses.

i.e., credit can buy time in the nearly literal sense, you can do an hour's work in half an hour because the money facilitates it, meaning you can now make more money. If instead of investing in work you're spending on play, then you end up with a time deficit.

or, e.g. you can buy 3 franchises in 3 months instead of 3 years (i.e. income from the 1 franchise), trading credit for time to make more money, instead of burning it. It'd have been nice had they taught me this in school.

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janalsncm ◴[] No.44362085[source]
Not sure what you mean by the “average person” here but the biggest kinds of debt are mortgages ($12T) and cc debt, student loans, and car loans (roughly 4T total).

Is your position that taking debt to buy a house is bad unless you can sell it for a profit? Is working for the mortgage lender to accomplish that not worth it?

You can avoid it by renting, but then you’re just working for the landlord, so there’s no avoiding it.

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Jcampuzano2 ◴[] No.44362135[source]
Every single thing you mentioned outside of cc debt (though arguably you should never reach for a credit card outside of using it for the points systems they provide) could be categorized as something used as a tool to make more money.
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eptcyka ◴[] No.44364155[source]
Vast majority of new car sales will not let the new owner make more money and were financed with debt.

If all of those buyers bought used for cash, nobody would be able to afford used cars for cash.

It really is only businesses that can convert debt into income, most consumers do not want to. There is nothing I can spend on to get a higher hourly rate.

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john01dav ◴[] No.44364211[source]
You can buy investment properties to convert debt to income and get nice returns. While this is technically a business, there are ways to make it quite passive and thus more like an investment than a business. Margin stock accounts also exist, although I don't know enough to know what situations it makes sense to use them in.
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1. avianlyric ◴[] No.44364407[source]
This has the rather tone deaf sound of “if you just had financial security, you wouldn’t need to use loans to survive, then you could use them to invest!”.

Which rather misses the point that many people using these tools don’t have financial security, and don’t have the option to invest like that.

Saying that mortgages can be used to buy investment properties doesn’t change the fact that most people use them to provide basic physical security. I.e. a literal roof over their head, that they can’t be taken away with little notice by their landlord for reasons completely beyond their control.

I’ve you’ve never grown up in an environment where the roof over your head isn’t a certainty, and indeed having a different roof over your head every few years is a certainty. Then it can be rather hard to understand why not everyone considers property just an investment opportunity.

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2. FireBeyond ◴[] No.44368029[source]
> I.e. a literal roof over their head, that they can’t be taken away with little notice by their landlord for reasons completely beyond their control.

Yeah. Before I bought my home four years ago, three of the last four landlords I'd had had promised long term stability, only to non-renew the lease after the first year (for "other" reasons: "Wife thought she'd like the country, we're moving back to the city", "We want a smaller mortgage payment on our primary home", We're going to renovate and sell"). It's a lot of fun moving a family every year. Especially when around here you also have to come up with first, last, security and other fees and can easily be looking at $10K+ just to move.