be careful the altruists will start coming out of the woodwork for a handout. :)

Yes! If I saw someone consistently forgoing gifts and luxuries and who I knew was on the right track, I might pay off their debt as a gift.

Why not return gifts? Also why buy them if you are in heavy debt? Give friends a card, thank for being a friend and let them know your paying down some debt so you could not buy gifts for everyone this year. You expect to do this for 3 more years, so pleas just get me a card....

The gift buying and giving is out of control in our society. Borrowing money to buy gifts is just insane and like unto what the government does every month.

I agree with your assessment. I have a niece that is a night manager at McDonald's and she makes $12.75 plus has OK benefits. She also is not very good at much of anything she does as she is always looking to do the minimum to keep from getting fired, but she has stuck around long enough that they promoted her. I would suspect a competent night manager would make more, and the store manager would make a rather good living.

Indeed. And I should point out that my nephew's parents can easily afford to buy their son a $300 pair of headphones. On the other hand, they gave him a budget, which the headphones exceeded considerably. He went to my mother and asked for more money, and she bought him the headphones. All voluntary, to be sure, but I have to wonder about the premises and values involved here.

a few things.. It is interesting to see the number of folks in the comments section there stepping up to defend McDonalds. I am actually fairly amazed on that one... As for McDonalds employing people under the age of 20. That will really depend on where you are. The thing is that the work is tailor made for people with low skills. So, it would make sense to see lots of people starting out in the workforce there. Of course every time the minimum wage is raised it makes less sense to the owners to hire high turn over employees and so the instead chose to hire older folks who are a bit more skilled and will be there longer. That however does not change the fact that the jobs are tailor made for folks who are less skilled and therefore wont get paid top dollar. So, lefty orgs like to pull out folks who apparently made some pretty horrible choices over the years and now are stuck viewing McDonalds as a career, instead of what it actually is which is a supplemental job designed to give younger folks a way to learn about working in the real world along with some extra spending money, or to have some college cash. In the end are we actually supposed to feel bad for the 40 somethings working on the line there who apparently spent their entire adult life not figuring out how to learn a valuable skill? I remember folks like that back when we were in Highschool, they were the ones who described learning as too hard, and not worth their time, or they just wanted to party.. Well, now its time to pay the bill for not investing in their futures.

This hot air about McDonalds employees paying for a house, children, and all the rest was written by a person who has never visited McDonald's. How many people in that restaurant are under the age of 20? Most all of them. I can assure you that the manager of a million dollar plus restaurant is not making $7.25 an hour. This is a totally ingenuous article of nothing but union talking points.

Everyone at my McDonald's is so amazingly cheerful and keen to go out of the way to help any customer. I don't know how they do it. I hope there's not a dark side behind it. If they wrote a book "Managing the McDonald's Way" I would pre-order it on Amazon. They just give me the appearance of an amazing business.

Regarding returning gifts to get out of debt, I agree with the advice.

Yeah what shrug said. Even the private schools have to teach according to what the government wants them too.

Let's do a survey of McDonald's employees and find out how many attended private school or were home schooled.
(I think Rozar means TOTAL privatizing of schools...get the gov OUT.)

Bad parenting. Grow up spending most of your time in a public school and this is the product. But no one ever thinks we should privatize the schools.

And why aren't these people embarrassed for expecting top pay for a fast food job. Are they new on this planet? It's a stepping stone...not a career. We've reached a new low.

Lol I think of someone wants to marry McDonald's and ask McDonald's to take care of them that's their choice. Just don't ask the government to force McDonald's.