The Economic Change

People have their own reasons to move to another place, but they mainly move because they have a tough time in their home country or something bad happened to them that caused them to leave their country For example, economic change affects many people if they did not know how to deal or with the problem. These things happened to my parents when we were in Hong Kong. The economic change happened one year after Hong Kong returned to China from the British control. In 1998, the stock market crashed, and after that day many people lost everything such as money, houses and their businesses. This all just happened in one day. Nobody saw this coming, and from that day on people’s lives become tougher than before.

The first effect of economic change was unemployment. Unemployment was a problem even before the economic change because a job is an individual financial support. The job my parents used to have was working at the restaurant, and both of them worked there for many years. After the stock market crashed, the restaurant started losing money, so the boss of the restaurant started to lay off the workers, and it included my parents. Once they lost their job at the restaurant, it meant they would not get the financial support to pay off what they owe the bank. Therefore, my parents are one of those individuals that lost their job and it becomes a problem because they couldn’t pay off their debt.

The second effect was home foreclosures. It happened to almost everyone during that time because before the stock market crashed, the housing prices was high than original prices. However, after the stock market crash, the housing prices dropped very fast and some of them dropped even lower than from the original price. This happened to my parents because the house price dropped since that day and my parents couldn’t pay the mortgage after they lost their job. The bank gave my parents a warning letter for the payment and told us the house may end up taken away if we don’t pay them. Therefore, my father went to his parents to borrow money to pay the bank, so we would not end up with foreclosure. My grandparents helped us a lot when we were in these kinds of situations and saved us just in time before the bank took back the house. Therefore, my parents couldn’t pay the mortgage anymore, so we went back to live at my grandparent’s house and sold the house.

The third effect of the economic change was people having a tough time managing daily necessities. After that day, people had lost almost everything. Sometimes, it could take a month, a year, or even in just a week to lose what they have. During this time, my parents used up all their saving just for survival. For my parents, their saving was used mostly to pay off their debit before they ran into bankruptcy. Meanwhile, my parents wanted to try to avoid bankruptcy, so they cut out the daily expense like going out to having dinner, buying clothes and food and setting the limit for the daily expense. On the other hand, to cut out these expenses helped my parents save money to pay off the debit. Therefore, this put my parents into deep trouble, and it was for us hard to get out of this kind of situation.

Alought everybody think Hong Kong will be better than under British control, and also the economic will much better than the past. However, nobody expected after one year, the stock market crash, and the economic change would affect many people who brought houses at a very high price. After the crash, some people choose to moved away from Hong Kong and some choose to stayed in Hong Kong. Therefore, for now the economic in Hong Kong it seems better than after the crashed, but it took many year to recover the economic. Therefore, for my parents, they moved away because of the economic change and they had thought about this problem before they moved to the United States. The economic change is one of the reasons people move away to the other countries and also they maybe afraid of is it going to help them or not if they move to another country.