A Very Slow Shift Away from a Culture of Risk and Debt

More articles about saving money have been appearing lately in the personal finance section of Yahoo Finance. This makes me think that the mortgage problems are making people more risk averse, which IMHO is a very good thing.

In that vein, there was an article today with the promising title Some Live Without Credit Cards -- Could You? Unfortunately, most of the article buys into the banks’ way of thinking that some consumer debt is a good thing and that having a high credit score matters. These gems are just a small sample:

• Stop to consider the long-term implications on your credit score.
• A credit card is going to demonstrate how, if you pretty much have an open-end except for a credit ceiling, you can charge varying amounts each month, thus your payment each month is going to be different, and they like to see how you handle that.

If banks like it, I need to run out and do it? Why do we care what banks like to see? I guess because we want to borrow more money. But wait, I thought this article was about living without credit cards.

A third of the article is about things you can do to make banks like you and want to lend you more money. The rest is about people who can’t get banks to lend them money and people who do very stupid things for debt. The tenor is that some use of consumer debt is a smart thing as long as you don’t go overboard. There is only one sentence about the concept of spending only what’s in the bank account. All this is unfortunate, but still, front page articles even questioning consumer debt is a step in the right direction.