Teresa’s shopping spree starts at :35 in

Real Housewives of New Jersey’s Teresa Giudice and her husband are prime examples of people spending themselves frivolously into the ground and then using bankruptcy to avoid taking personal responsibility for their debts. On the show, Guidice was shown regularly splurging on high end shopping sprees for her young daughters, blowing wads of cash on furniture, and bragging about spending money. Check out her introduction at the beginning of the series in the video above. (Starting at about :35 in.) She talks about how much she loves fashion, how her little girls “have to look perfect all the time,” and how she spends her husband’s money. She spends $120,000 on furniture in the segment above and then brings the camera crew on a tour of her mansion that’s in construction, saying “My whole house has nothing but marble, granite and onyx.” She also says she had her house built because “I didn’t want to go house shopping… it’s just skeeve looking at other people’s houses. I don’t want to live in somebody else’s house, that’s gross.”

Teresa and her husband Joe recently filed for bankruptcy, citing debts of a whopping $11 million. In a statement to People Magazine, Teresa blamed the poor economy and her husband’s failed real estate investments for their financial situation, and called bankruptcy a “fresh start.” On paper, Teresa and Joe made less than $100,000 a year.

Now Teresa is talking to Popeater and she’s still refusing to take accountability for the way she went through money like water. She says that her spending wasn’t all that bad and that the show exaggerated it for ratings. I’m sure they made her move into that $1.8 million home when her family earned less than six figures a year, too.

You have come under so much criticism for spending thousand of dollars on shopping sprees for your children just weeks before you filed for bankruptcy. Can you explain it?
You have to remember that what you see on TV is edited for entertainment and a lot of it was filmed years ago. Milania was 2 when we started filming and now she’s almost 5! It was a different economy back then for all of us. When the economy crashed, like most families, we tightened our belts and changed our lifestyle.

What have you learned from all this?
No matter what happens, rich or poor, if we have our health, our family and love, we’ll all be fine. You can be fabulous even if you don’t have a dime! It’s all about attitude, hard work and morals. We teach our kids all three and lead by example. I have lots of jobs: I film the show, I do appearances, I run an online boutique called TG Fabulicious and I have my writing. I’m working on my next book right now! That we’re still able to have dinner with our kids every night is such a blessing.

Do you have any advice for other families that have had to ‘tighten their belts’?
One of the ways we’ve always saved money is by cooking at home, and I was so happy to be able to share some of those tips and recipes with people in ‘Skinny Italian.’

The book has done amazingly well. I was honestly shocked by its success. How does that feel when on the other hand you are broke?
I’m blown away by the response to the book. I can’t believe it’s been on the New York Times bestseller list for three weeks. I still have to pinch myself. But I think everyone is looking for ways to spend less and have more family time, and eating dinner at home every night gives you both. I have people write me saying how their kids are picky eaters and are finally eating vegetables, how families are eating together again, and it makes everything worthwhile.

[From Popeater]

Oh yes, Teresa has that cookbook she’s shilling which is inexplicably #164 on Amazon’s bestseller list. Now she’s getting her debts discharged so she can go back to her old money spending habits. All her homes and properties are in foreclosure and I hope this fool has to live in a small rented apartment crammed full of her tacky, worthless crap like on that show Hoarders. Let’s see how she likes living in “someone else’s” one bedroom, one bathroom apartment with her husband and three four kids – as if that would ever happen.