Keeping Up with Los Garcia

I'm not sure what the Spanish equivalent is to the expression "Keeping up with the Joneses", but there has to be one. Even without knowing the people on the street, common sense tells you that there is no way so many people are as rich as they live.

You see it everywhere. BMWs, Audis, Mercedes cars everywhere you look (from what I gather, they are a little cheaper here than in the US, but still!). The latest styles on every woman. Lots and lots of skiing vacations for the school children. Wildly expensive houses. Weekly proof! One of Jose and my favorite TV programs (we only watch 3) is Ajuste de Cuentas. Every week the presenter goes to a different family's house and helps them sort out their financial mess. The only bad thing about the show is that it's more or less the same every week. Families that lived like kings and queens for years and now find themselves with loads of debts, maybe multiple houses (because of buying one before the other sold), and crazy spending habits.

It's a familiar tale, I know. Millions of Americans spend beyond their means and have a scary amount of credit card debt. But in Spain I see it a little different. In the US it's a problem easy to ignore, since you never know someone's salary or earning potential. Because everyone has debt it's become acceptable. Everyone is believed to have the ability to work a little harder to earn more money to buy anything what they want. I know it doesn't work this way in real life, but that's what we're led to believe.
In Spain, however, I know that the average monthly salary is less than 1,000 euros. And I know that it's almost impossible to buy a house for less than 150,000 euros (and that's not a bad price!). So where are these people getting the money to eat out all the time, buy lots of clothes, afford a mortgage on that house, buy new cars and go out to drink with their friends once or twice a week? That's what I don't understand.

You get the feeling like people know something you don't (like the exact location of a money tree). And at times it's hard: to stay at home,to buy the car we can afford, to spend what we've budgeted to spend, to save like crazy people. But sometimes it's great, especially when we can afford fun trips. We're about to make one of the most important financial decisions of our life, buying a house. It's a decision we've already spent lots of time thinking about, and Jose has already made multiple spreadsheets to show all our options. Knowing that this one decision will affect the rest of our lives (in this case, financially speaking), it's not something that we're taking lightly, yet it's strange and a little hard to look at it so differently than so many people, Spanish and otherwise.

Get ready for lots of posts!