Bank Payments and Having Children when SHTF

Hi ferfal my name is Aris from Greece I am 31 years married no children yet. I had send you before an e mail many years before but didnt get an answer its ok I had your book for guidance hope you are ok.

I know you are very busy so I’ll make it quick.

I have a question need your advice .

What did you do in Argentina with banks? my father has a  house loan and till now we pay it  many people here dont paid the banks because they waiting bankrupsy and to come drachma alredy the banks here make some cut to the loans if someone  has 10000 euro loan and can afford to pay the say pay us 5000 euro cash and we are ok.

Many clever guys took advance of this so me and my father feel like suckers that we struggle  to be ok with our payments.

questions

1 shall i stop paying the bank and keep the money in offshore or as we say in the matress waiting?2 keep paying ?

Thanks.

Also a personal  question my wife and I want to make a child start a family but situation here is very bad economical shall I wait for better days or to start having children, how was in Argetina the birth  rate after the economic collapse?

I try to buy the new book of you but don’t have money right now waiting the summer for work. I love my country and I don’t want to leave.

Thanks for all the advices from the first book sorry for my english!!!

-Aris

…

Hello Aris,

I’m sorry I didn’t reply to your previous email. Some days it piles up and if the following day I also get a bunch its sometimes hard to keep up. Sometimes they end up filtered as spam for whatever reason.

Regarding your first question. What you certainly DON’T want to do is to lose your house to the bank. You need an advisor to go over your contract and make sure that whatever it is that you do, you do not endanger that.  Having said that, yes, many times you pay every month and then comes this guy that hasn’t paid a cent all year and gets a bigger discount than you. Banks are all about making money, not being fair, let alone being your friend. If they can charge you 2x they will, and if they believe they can only get 1x out of another person then they will go for that. In Argentina its common practice to pile up property municipal fees and wait for some payment scheme that offers a bigger discount to debtors. In that case yes, the person that paid in time feels like a sucker. After making sure you are not endangering possession (don’t know how this works in Greece) maybe you can save up that money in an offshore account. If you have to make the payment you still have the money, if eventually a better deal can be made and save money then you can try that too.

As for your question regarding children my advice is to go for it. I had my first boy right after the  big collapse of 2001. It wasn’t easy, as you say money was tight, but it was worth every second and I’m glad we had him back then rather than wait. As I explained in my previous post, you have to live today, not plan to live 5 years from now and this is especially true with having kids. Have them young, enjoy them. In Argentina birth rates went up soon after the crisis. This is pretty common, for people to invest more in family when times are tough.

FerFAL
Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”.