Check this out:

http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/1086-Ok,-Im-Done-With-Being-Nice.html

The author pretty much rips an old lady a new one for extremely poor financial choices, and castigates the New York Times for putting out such tripe. I have to agree on the tripe part. What is the point of putting out a “poor her” story about someone who obviously made some serious mistakes over and over again in treating her house like an ATM? Do the writers not understand what an absolutely idiotic financial move it is to take out a home equity loan to buy a new car? The only thing dumber would be is if she took out money to pay for a leased car.

She ran up credit card debt, living outside her means (I assume if there had been some emergencies the article would have listed them), and again used her house an atm. They mention a “new roof” being the largest chunk of change out of a $20,000 cash out, but I’m calling bs on that. I bet most of that was to pay off credit card debt again.

Look, I don’t want to pile on Ms. Ulery. I’m not happy that she’s in the situation, but let’s be honest. She’s not taking any responsibility for her actions and she’s complaining about the government not doing enough to help her. As a libertarian, of course, I don’t think the government should be involved in this mess at all, but how can even the most liberal of people think it’s okay for taxpayer money to pay for people’s mistakes like this? Nothing in the story points to any sort of catastrophic event in her life. Nothing about a major illness contributing to past debt (though some sort of “stress illness” is mentioned now preventing her from working), nothing about a nasty divorce, or failed business. Nothing at all which appears to be out of her control. No, she made a series of decisions that of course would end up where she is now. And she wants the US taxpayer to pay up and bail her out.

I’ve made plenty of financial mistakes in my past. I carried too much credit card debt in my 20’s. I didn’t save enough, I never should have bought the Intrepid I own, and something else happened that was kind of out of my control that still effects me today. However, in all cases, it was my fault. I know exactly what decisions I made that were poor and led to the chain reaction of events. Even the event that was really out of my control could have been mitigated better if I had paid better attention. At no point, did I even conceive of blaming someone else. I can’t even fathom the thought process that would have led me to blame others.

Only when you take responsibility, can you fix the problems. I don’t carry credit card debt anymore, and I hate the feeling of having any debt aside from my mortgage. The only debt Kelly and I have now outside our mortgage is a small line of credit we used to buy our couch. It’s not like we even need it, we’re just keeping the cash in the bank to earn a little interest while our credit line has no interest for a while. Even though it’s just a cash flow arrangement that will never cost me a dime, it still bothers me a little. I don’t like having debt.

When we bought out first house, we put down 20%, took a fixed year mortgage, and paid less than the market value. Two years later, we still paid less than market value, even with the real estate slump. We were tempted to take out some equity to redo our kitchen, but ultimately decided against it. Just didn’t seem worth it to borrow for something that would basically be for vanity. We’ll just focus on saving up and doing it later. The point is, our house isn’t an ATM. If something catastrophic happened we could use the equity or sell it off, but only in extreme emergencies.

I’m not sure I ended up where I wanted to, but I think my point is: Take responsibility for your own actions and understand the consequences. It’s clear the New York Times and Ms. Ulery don’t understand this.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 9:07 am and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.