The Real Housewives Of Atlanta And The Real Consequences Of Credit Card Debt
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Although Lisa Wu Hartwell was never one of the leading lights of The Real Housewives Of Atlanta and left Bravo's reality TV craze after the first season, the many named (Lisa Wu Sweat, Sharon Millette Wu, and any number of other aliases ) quasi celebrity and consumer finance personality impeccably emblemizes everything that's made the basic cable cabal perennial destination viewing ... but also serves as vivid symbol of all the dangers that credit card debt bestows upon even the seemingly wealthiest Georgians. Hartwell's financial difficulties started prior to the moment she was chosen to appear on TRH Of Atlanta. She found it impossible to avoid bankruptcy in 2007, and, two years later, was forced to surrender her Duluth, Georgia mansion to foreclosure - purchased for three million dollars, it received just a shade over two million during the state mandated auction.
NeNe Leakes, on the other hand, for all of the loving montages of credit card debt fueled boutique binges of redecorating, didn't even own her residence and was evicted last fall after owing thousands of dollars in back rent while her husband had tax problems running over six figures. Sheree Whitfield, another breakout "reality star" from the Bravo series, has suffered through a string of investigations by the media regarding her family troubles from well before filming began, but her debt relief issues are far more serious. After failing to receive the hoped for million dollar divorce debt settlement from her most recent marriage, Whitfield has truly hit rock bottom: taking her kids out of private school and the small but significant humiliation of having a check returned for an amount of less than three hundred and fifty dollars.
It's almost too perfectly apropos that Lisa Hartwell and several other women to appear in The Real Housewives Of Atlanta would also have cameo roles in The Joneses. Filmed in the affluent suburb of Alpharetta - one of Georgia's wealthiest communities with median household incomes around one hundred and eighty thousand dollars and residents including Jeff Foxworthy, Usher Raymond, and Whitney Houston (who has had her own share of debt relief problems on the public record) - The Joneses featured David Duchovny and Demi Moore in what critics deemed to be a fitfully profitable romantic comedy vehicle about the dangers of aspirational spending. While the satire may have fallen flat in the theaters, the underlying message about just how far the mammoth credit card debt merchants would go to further their own ends deserved a greater hearing.
The Real Housewives Of Atlanta And The Real Consequences Of Credit Card Debt
Around the Atlanta area, talk about The Joneses may have had more to do with propelling the Georgia film industry or highlighting the upward mobility of the North Fulton metro area or, especially, the barbs traded between Whitfield and Kim Zolciak (whose home own Atlanta home also reportedly sold for some hundred thousand dollars less than the price of purchase) during the course of filming. It's a pity, though, that the film did not attain a wider audience - or, for that matter, the film was not better all around - because this was a true accounting of all that The Real Housewives of Atlanta could only ever obliquely suggest. In other words, true sons and daughters of Georgia should never confuse the desire to drape themselves in the trappings of wealth with the real meaning of success.
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