Crunchy Granola

A brief follow-up on my credit-crunch post: predictably, a couple of people felt I was too sympathetic to deadbeats. Truth is, in real life Grant and I are almost pathologically risk-averse: rather than leverage everything from our underwear up to invest in the tech boom or the real-estate boom, we keep plodding along, avoiding debt as though it were our crazy Aunt Martha, and as a result we'll never get rich, but we're also much less likely to find ourselves indecently exposed when the bottom falls out (as it were). And now and then I've given in to the strong temptation to feel superior to the folks who are one late payment away from foreclosure, because, after all, the terms and conditions however usurious are spelled out in the fine print, a debt is an obligation to repay, people ought to know these things, we've become a nation of grasshoppers, bankruptcy no longer carries a stigma, o tempora, o mores.

But most of the hand-wringing I've seen along these lines looks only at the debtor side of the coin. I'd bet my skivvies those brazen bankrupts of lender lore are far outnumbered by the Mr. Potters who seem to have hung out a shingle on every street corner. Where is the stigma attached to taking advantage of the poor, the ill-informed, and the underpaid?

And Grant and I may be risk-averse, but we're also lucky. In a ton of ways, I realize once I start to count them up, we've been in the right place at the right time, through no effort or virtue of our own.

I found a couple of interesting links on the subject. The incomparable Fred addresses credit scores with his usual wit and verve; and on a new-to-me blog Tanta lays out subprime 101. If, like me, you look at the whole fiasco and wonder "what were they thinking?", you'll be fascinated by this post.