I own a hair salon. Typically, November is my busiest season. It has been SO quiet. A lot of my colleagues are also saying the same thing and have had to close up shop because of it - or get a second job.

People keep saying it will get better and the economy will bounce back but I don’t know. I am so close from just throwing in the towel, closing up shop and getting a corporate gig.

  • Diggtastic@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    We’ll school loans started back up in October. The hundreds of extra dollars I had in discretionary income is now gone for the next 8-10 years until I pay it off. Gotta cut expenses elsewhere.

    • rynil2000@alien.topB
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      10 months ago

      If you weren’t paying those loans back during the 3 years where interest was halted, then you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.

      You basically gave up the best payment term offer ever for hope on a pipe dream that the government would wave a magic wand and make your debt disappear.

      • HardlyEverWrong@alien.topB
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        10 months ago

        Why pay back loans when you can blow all your money and hope Biden forgives your debt in the meantime?
        People like to act like it was some big mystery what caused inflation as if printing trillions and pausing paying debt/rent/mortgages wasn’t the obvious answer all along.

        • rynil2000@alien.topB
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          10 months ago

          It’s not meant as a partisan comment, but more a personal finance statement about how not acting at all to pay loans back was never a good plan.

          Anyone who trusts the government to actively wipe away your debt/their income is a fool. PPP loans were paid to the same crooks that run and lobby the government. Contrarily, Trump wouldn’t have even given people the hope of student debt relief. Understandably, people wanted to count their chickens before they hatched and are now going to regret it.

      • aleigh577@alien.topB
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        10 months ago

        Not the person your responding to but I was paying them for a good amount of time while interest was paused until things got so dire to where minimum payments on bills were the most I could do (if that). You have to remember there’s a reason they were paused in the first place

      • Diggtastic@alien.topB
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        10 months ago

        Lot of assumptions being made with this comment. I was basically saying that a ton of people now have payments they didn’t the past 3.5 years while everything else is still getting more expensive, hence the potential reason for the slowdown in the economy. That’s it.

        • Elmo_Chipshop@alien.topB
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          10 months ago

          Well there was this thing that happened that paused a lot of the payments in the first place since a lot of people lost their entire incomes

          • Itchy_Passion_8165@alien.topB
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            10 months ago

            If you lost your job, you weren’t contributing to discretionary spending anyway because you were scrapping to stay alive. Thus, if your loans restarting is decreasing your monthly funko budget, you were just making bad choices and avoiding the inevitable reality

      • pastelpixelator@alien.topB
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        10 months ago

        I didn’t pay mine during that time because I was laid off just like 250,000 other people in my metro. Many business owners didn’t pay them because no one was fucking shopping for 1.5-2 years. Don’t be a simpleton. This is a complex issue.