My parents have always been afraid of having to apply for bankrupcy. When I was younger, all I ever heard was bankrupcy this, bankrupcy that, and save all the money that you can. They never bought me anything too extravagant. In fact, we still had a black and white TV up in the living room. And, no, we didn’t have cable and, actually, we never got it. We didn’t have air conditioning either, which made all those stifling summers unbearable. As you can probably tell, I didn’t spend much time at home as a kid. My friends had cable and air conditioning and video games and, obviously, parents who weren’t obsessed with bankrupcy. It’s not that my parents didn’t love me and want the best for me. It wasn’t like they didn’t buy me gifts for Christmas or my birthday. They just needed to get over the whole bankrupcy thing. Both of them made more than enough money to get by. My mother was a nurse and my father still works as a stationary engineer. Both make at least around 60-70 thousand dollars a year. They’re not rich, sure, but they’re not poor either. They just never learned to relax and spend some of that saved up money on themselves.