Chris and money

“	He's not good at math when it comes to managing money.	”
Bob Chandler

It's obvious that Chris himself has no grasp on the real value of money, since he actively wastes as much of his monthly tugboat as possible on luxuries like trading cards, sex toys, porn, video games, and, more recently, alcohol. He also once, when giving out the laws of CWCville, equated 10 years in prison to a $1,500 fine. He also equated 50 hours of community service to $500 (for any sexual violations).

Chris is a self-admitted impulse buyer. His PSN account shows that he's never played more than half of the games he's bought. And yet, astoundingly, he's still gone out of his way to buy all available downloadable content for every PS3 game that he's ever purchased, and he also further promoted his Sony fanboyism by later buying a Sony LCD HDTV for his bedroom which likely cost at least about $1,000-$1,500. All the while, Chris buys his clothes at second-hand discount thrift stores.

But wait, Chris isn't employed!

Chris's only source of income is the $809 "tugboat" that he receives from the U.S. federal government every month, placing his annual income at $9,708 a year. Chris's parents take $450 to pay for room and board. This payment was later increased to $565, and then to $580, after Bob paid off Chris's enormous credit card debt. In addition, Chris and his family get SNAP money every month - more commonly known as "food stamps."

“	My father helped me get my Social Security set up; I get more a month than I could at a job.	”
Chris, completely deluded and taking pride in being a lazy bastard.

Chris's father has been encouraging his son to remain unemployed, since he believes that Chris will earn more money from his monthly tugboat than from getting a job. However, this assumption is inaccurate. Minimum wage in the state of Virginia is $7.25 an hour. If Chris were to somehow do a complete 180° on his life and begin working a full forty-hour week, his monthly payment before taxes and payment for room and board would be about $1,260 - $15,100 annually. Subtracting what he pays his parents to live in filth monthly, as well as the 5% tax his income range mandates in the state of Virginia, Chris could very likely be left with a ridiculous $9,000 in spending money, as in, for more sex toys and video games. Contrast this with the $4,200 Chris pulls annually from the government after paying off his parents (roughly equal to what he's spent in total so far on his PS3); it becomes clear that Bob's encouragement comes from either delusion or knowing that his son is a failure.

A very likely explanation for Chris's reckless spending is that his coddling parents are at fault (to a degree at least). In addition to coddling him throughout his entire life, they have managed to make sure that Chris has never felt the repercussions for his exorbitant spending by taking over paying Chris's credit card debt, regularly giving him about "$6 a day for small things", buying him fast food on a daily basis, and continuing to let himself blow all his money on frivolities and useless stuff, as opposed to essentials like hygiene products. Whenever Chris manages to get himself into trouble, he knows that Bob and Barb will come running to his aid and defend him and dig him out of whatever mess he's managed to get himself into, even if it is clear that his is in the wrong. This enabling is the most likely explanation (in addition to his poor impulse control) for why Chris spends himself into debt as much as he does.

Chris strongly believes that by receiving and spending his tugboat on useless shit he is aiding the economy and paying for the tugboat of others. Again, this demonstrates his idiocy since sales tax goes to the state government and these "tugboats" are paid with federal payroll tax. Apparently, this is too complex for Chris's autistic mind. Where Chris is hiding the printing press to afford this discretionary spending is unknown.

Interestingly enough, while he has no clue how to handle money, Chris has an unhealthy fixation on his material possessions. In Vivitheg's AIM chat, he stated that he did not want to sell any of his stuff, and in the Miyamoto Saga, he refused to sell anything to help raise money for the trip to Redmond.

Credit cards

As surprising as it is that Chris has his own credit cards, it is equally unsurprising how unwisely he uses them. As of February 2009, Chris had managed to rack up $2,000 worth of debt (at the time of Mumble 4, $1,000 of that sum came from the PSN store, but his bill for PSN downloads increases by the day) and had even stolen his parents' credit cards to use when his own were maxed out. According to an e-mail Chris sent to Vivian Gee, by January 2010 his debt was around $3,500 and had apparently been higher at some point in the intervening time.

By then, Bob Chandler had had to step in, forcing Chris to put the brakes on his spending and pay down his debt according to a regular schedule. Chris, unaware of or uninterested in the fact that unpaid credit-card debt accrues vast amounts of interest, had historically made payments in the smallest installments possible.

In July of 2010, it was revealed by Chris in an e-mail to Jackie that Bob has assisted in managing his raging debt, and now Bob gets another $100 out of the monthly tugboat in compensation. This act of parental scapegoating had potentially cleared Chris's future to be free of bad credit and crushing debt, had he not already accuired another credit card, without his parent's permission or knowledge. He is already paying $50 a month on it, suggesting that he has had it for some time, as well as returning to his habit of paying only the minimum. The countdown to his next act of financial dumbassery begins (but his play of the Autism Card was immediate)...

In the comic

CWCville currency.

In the comic it is clear Chris has no idea how money works. Sonichu, Rosechu, Patti-Chan, and most likely all of the other characters live off welfare, just like Chris IRL. He seems to have no concept of tax, or that it's the American populace who pay for his bullshit. Sonichu and Rosechu are living in a two-story house with an attic offered by the city and they are "paid" in average of US$3,500 a month just to hang around. And maybe for the occasional city defense or errand.

In Episode 19, it's shown that CWCVille actually issues its own currency, in the form of C-Quarters and W-Quarters. Ten C-Quarters make up a W-Quarter - don't bother asking how that makes sense in any way, considering what the word "quarter" means. (Our best guess: C-Quarters = US$0.25, W-Quarters = US$2.50) Nor does it explain why fines are levied in U.S. dollars: perhaps to bolster the dictatorship's foreign currency reserves, a la North Korea.

This makes even less sense considering CWCVille is in the United States, and states, let alone cities, while having considerable power, cannot print their own money. The Constitution expressly forbids anyone else other than the federal government from issuing currency. Granted, states used to issue their own money - when they were colonies, and during hard times like the Revolutionary War. Chris being Chris, and likely reading Goosebumps instead of paying attention in class, missed out on this information.

In other works

Chris shows us his complete misunderstanding of the stress his ideas would put on the American Social Security system if he was left in charge of it in a text called "A Sonichu and Rosechu Christmas Story." This is where the idea of "Soup Hotels" came from.

“	Even the homeless have a place to stay in the ten Soup Kitchens/Hotels.	”
Chris with a very bad idea that has come to frution in one American city...

Chris depicts "Soup Hotels" as a building ten stories tall with between ten and twenty rooms per floor, equipped with single bathrooms, bed, lighting and cable TV. Of course, the homeless will stay there for free. So, instead of building homeless shelters with dormitories, common rooms, and shared TV sets, Chris thinks the homeless should be treated to all the comforts of a bona fide hotel. This means that, in CWCville, there are around 1,500 homeless people left outside. This might be the result of the local industry, choked by heavy taxes needed to pay those social expenses, being unable to make a profit there and thus moving away.

In Sonichu #10, Ultra Sonichu and a bevy of Rosechus stop at a soup hotel. The building is labeled Soup Hotel 17, implying that CWCville has had to open at least seven new homeless shelters in the span of a month, or they're just bad at numbering the things. Or more tellingly, that the economy of CWCville is crashing to the ground, fast.

In Mailbag 29 he states that $10 an hour is a reasonable price to pay for sex with a prostitute. To show his further ignorance of simple economics, Chris proposed a chain of state-run brothels where this shockingly inexpensive fee would not only pay women for sex, pay the salary of a pimp (which would be a redundant middleman in a state-approved brothel), pay for STD testing for the prostitutes, but would also pay for free Sex Ed classes for virgins. In real life, Chris tried to scam his way out of paying for sex with a Craigslist prostitute who was charging $100 per hour by telling her about the trolls, his life story, and his many personal problems. The prostitute hung up on him.

Chris also proves us that, in the possibility of being part of a family, he wouldn't be the main purveyor. In the PlayingHouse video, his sweetheart of the moment is portrayed as a successful journalist with high ambitions while he's a stay at home Dad. Even then, he portrays himself doing "hard work" like changing diapers and watching over the kids. In this last role, he's so incompetent that he needs to recruit his preschool daughter to watch over his son while he's shopping.

On TV

In Mumble 6, Chris discussed making a TV show called The Chris Chandler Show. One of his demands was the show should not have any commercial breaks, either showing a distinct lack of understanding as to how a TV station makes money, or perhaps he plans to sell the advertising fees to a single company so that they can play a long ad in the beginning of the air time and leave the rest of the show uninterrupted, à-la the season premieres of 24. We cannot know for sure, but he has probably seen at least one show that has done this, and gathered the idea from there.

Chris also seems to not understand that if the health department, of Greene County, sees that TV show, that he put on the damn TV, they could be evicted, and he would have to move out.

Best Buy Mastercard

In the Matthew Noble call, it was revealed by Bob himself that Chris not only has a Mastercard charge account acquired through Best Buy, but as of the second week of August 2010, Chris had somehow used it to land himself in yet more debt and had been laden with fees for bouncing a card payment. Bob, in the throes of some sort of conspiracy paranoia involving the staff and patrons of the GAMe PLACe, claims that it was most likely Michael Snyder who had hacked Chris's credit card and checking accounts, though why someone who's been on a manager's salary for several years would bother stealing from Chris is unknown. Also unknown is why any financial institution would give Chris a line of credit at this point.

Bob continues that the resulting transactions may have ruined Chris' credit rating (though that ship has long since fucking sailed), and, in a disturbingly Chris-like fashion, seems to use this damning information to try to make Chris' latest brush with the Law seem "petty" in comparison.

There are three possibilities as to what has actually occurred (from least to most likely):

• Trolls have achieved this new pinnacle of fucking with Chris and didn't bother bragging about it on some forum or another.
• Some regular criminal's credit card fraud scheme has, just by chance, hit Chris.
• Chris blew whatever little credit that Best Buy had foolishly given him, mistakenly attempted to pay off the card with funds from his checking account that weren't there, and is now blaming his crippling debt on Trolls, in another transparent attempt to not have to take responsibility.

In the Jackie Emails, it was discovered that Chris took out the Mastercard without his parent's permission. He only told them about it when he received two bounced check fees that would show up on his bank statement, which his father is now actively monitoring. In true Chris fashion, he tried to pay the minimum balance each month. When he was forced to reveal the debt to his parents, Bob was obviously less than thrilled: He promptly took control of Chris's bank account as well as his debit card. Chris is now paid only in Visa gift cards, leaving him unable to occur any more debt. The prospect of not being able to blow his welfare on frivolities stressed him out.

See also

• Monthly tugboat