If you are familiar with the book Les Miserables, or its musical or cinematic adaptions, you know that the protagonist, Jean Valjean is sent to prison for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving children. Hugo's story pits the desperate against the rigid inflexibility of the law. I was thinking about Les Miserables this morning when I was listening to the podcast of the Dave Ramsey show from yesterday.
Dave took a call from a 60 year-old woman who had become ill and declared disabled by Social Security. She said she was receiving $700 per month in benefits. The reason for her call was that she had $12,000 in credit card debt that she racked up on her credit cards while waiting for Social Security to kick in. That is how she supported herself when she couldn't work, but also couldn't collect Social Security.
I am not sure how I feel about that. A couple of years ago I would have been positive that it is stealing. She used the credit cards knowing that it was unlikely that she could repay the money she borrowed. To her credit she has stopped charging and is somehow surviving on the $700 bucks, but there is no way she can repay the money. She told Dave she is considering bankruptcy.
Does this strike you are dishonest? I think it is, but like Valjean, what are her options? As the man said, "Desperate times call for desperate measures."
I'm just not sure how I feel about this. On one hand it is clear that charging items you don't intend to pay for is wrong, but is theft in pursuit of survival wrong?
Then again, I can rationalize (there's that word again) it by saying the the credit card companies victimize the poor and that their business model is constructed to accept a high level of loss. Maybe they got what they had coming.
Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgemental and cranky
Tag: Daily Life
Personal Finance
Humor
Dave took a call from a 60 year-old woman who had become ill and declared disabled by Social Security. She said she was receiving $700 per month in benefits. The reason for her call was that she had $12,000 in credit card debt that she racked up on her credit cards while waiting for Social Security to kick in. That is how she supported herself when she couldn't work, but also couldn't collect Social Security.
I am not sure how I feel about that. A couple of years ago I would have been positive that it is stealing. She used the credit cards knowing that it was unlikely that she could repay the money she borrowed. To her credit she has stopped charging and is somehow surviving on the $700 bucks, but there is no way she can repay the money. She told Dave she is considering bankruptcy.
Does this strike you are dishonest? I think it is, but like Valjean, what are her options? As the man said, "Desperate times call for desperate measures."
I'm just not sure how I feel about this. On one hand it is clear that charging items you don't intend to pay for is wrong, but is theft in pursuit of survival wrong?
Then again, I can rationalize (there's that word again) it by saying the the credit card companies victimize the poor and that their business model is constructed to accept a high level of loss. Maybe they got what they had coming.
Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgemental and cranky
Tag: Daily Life
Personal Finance
Humor
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