Shopping Sprees, and Paying Forever

It's rather a cliche that what girls and women most like to do is shop, and what they most like to buy is shoes and clothes. (I like to shop, too, but what I most like to buy is books! But then, I do work from home.)

In any event, the United States is currently undergoing a financial crisis, with many people unable to pay for their home mortgages and their credit card bills.

And what's happening? Why, they are being rewarded for their fiscal irresponsibility. The government and local programs are stepping in to help them out - placing the burden for keeping these people in homes they can't afford, and with credit they don't deserve to have - on the banks and credit card companies, who are being made out to be the villains of the peice.

Oh, I don't say that the ways of banks seem rather counter-intuitive. You have a low interest rate as long as you make your payments on time, but miss one payment and you're interest rate goes up! So if you were unable to make your payment when the interest rate was low, how do they expect you to be able to make it now that it is high?

But that's not the point of this post. The point of this post is rather a moral one - if you enter into obligations, you should keep them. And by exercising a little common sense and a little knowledge of math, you should be able to see what those obligations will be, if you'll be able to make them, and if you can't... then you dont enter into them to begin with!

Take buying something with a credit card. Whenever you get a credit card, you get lots of papers explaining the rules and regulations of that card. Most importantly, it will tell you how much interest you will have to pay on anything you purchase.

How many people get a credit with a $4,000 limit, and buy a $1,000 dress, without bothering to figure out how much they'll have to pay each month? Then they get their credit card bill and realize that with the cost of their rent, their car payment, their this and their that, they can't afford that extra credit card payment.

So they default on the credit card. And because the department store where they purchased the dress has already been paid in full by the credit card company (who has loaned the purchaser the money to get that dress), the department store has their money, and will not send a collection agent to your house to repossess that dress. (That happens with cars, however! And homes!)

So it is the credit card agency that is out $1,000.

Now, it used to be that people would move heaven and earth to pay their credit card bills, and only a small percentage would default.

Now, it's common place. People are encouraged to default on their credit card bills. After all, they say, it's just not fair that your credit card company charges you so much interest...they tricked you into buying more than you could afford and of course you shouldn't have to pay it all back!

Every day, if you listen to the radio, you will hear commericals for Debt Relief companies saying, "Here's powerful information credit card companies dont' want you to know. If you are more than $14,000 in credit card debt, you have the right to settle that debt for pennies on the dollar."

You may have the legal right, squeezed out of the credit card companies by a government that wants all debt to belong to them, but you do not have a moral right. If you bought something, you should pay for it. Otherwise, you are stealing.

That is what you must realize when you get your "easy money" - your credit card. It does not represent units, it does not represent "free money," it represents a debt that moral people know they will have to pay.

The government, of course, is busy saying that it's immoral for the people to whom you owe money to expect you to pay your bills, since you were tricked into buying more than you could afford, and you should get to keep whatever you bought (the house, the car, the clothes) and the people who sold it to you should have to pay you, instead.

A sad state of affairs.