There's apparently a new book out on middle class bankrupcy that looks interesting. It appears to validate what I've long thought the cause of many families' finances: Mortgages.

The average household has a lot more amenities than it used to. There are three and four (and five) car families, DVD players, HDTVs, and computers. While some may view this as excess (and in many cases it is), since the costs of all these products have gone down, they don't shoulder much of the blame.

Houses, on the other hand, are a bigger issue. Perhaps having grown up in Clear Lake I'm colored by my experiences. I've seen a number of families move from nice neighborhoods to really nice neighborhoods in large part because they could. As Elizabeth Warren suggests in her book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke, many married couples are counting on two incomes and are buying houses accordingly.

It reminds me of Sterling Chemical, a company which I've probably talked about before and will talk about again. If you've heard it, skip this paragraph. Before the days of Internet IPO's there were a series of chemical ones in the Houston area. One of them was Sterling Chemical. Overnight engineers became millionaires. Many moved into houses more befitting of their newfound wealth. When the dividends stopped coming around, though, they were left in such a crunch that housewives that hadn't worked since they sent hubby through grad school were having to re-enter the workforce.

The moral of the story is to live below your means. There are certain concessions you cannot (and should not) make regarding the well-being of your family. But moving from a lower-middle class neighborhood such as Seabrook to an upper-middle class one such as Middlebrook ought to be viewed as a luxury.

In the greater Clear Lake area there are three high schools, two of which are Clear Lake High and Clear Creek High. CLHS is the superior of the two by all accounts, recieving more recognition and awards than its older counterpart, CCHS. In all honesty, though, the difference between the two is marginal, but the difference in housing is huge.

My intermediate school, Seabrook, is probably more like Creek than Lake. There were a lot more thugs, more troublemakers, and until it became a magnet school, was inferior to Clear Lake Intermediate. At the same time, I got as good an education as I could have expected. Not so much because of the school, but because of my parents.

I wonder if many are so fixated on buying houses with the best schools because they expect the schools to educate their children. Of course, to a degree that's a school's job. But handing them off to a school for eight hours a day is placing an awful lot of power outside your control. Working longer hours (and thus being less able to work with them and staying on top of their efforts) to afford that is crazy.

There were a lot of troublemakers at Seabrook, but there were a lot of good kids. They lived in the same neighborhoods, ate at the same places. They hung out in different circles and, more often than not, had very different home lives. Parents worried about their kids falling in with the "bad crowd" ought to spend more time asking themselves what they can personally do to prevent that from happening that doesn't involve a mortgage that they can't afford.

The worst thing - which I see often - is making the size and neighborhood of a house a status symbol. Viewing a house as an investment where you must buy an expensive one to get a good return is asking for bankrupcy.