There was a bizarre piece on Woman’s Hour today, asking how is it that so many women are going bankrupt nowadays.
One of the reasons advocated is that more women are exposed to the economy by being wage earners etc and that part of the argument is fair enough, there are more in the line of fire.
Then we had Alexis, who got herself into £31,000 worth of debt. Let’s take a look at some of her reasoning:
Jenni (interviewer) “How did it [your debt] get so high”?
Alexis “It got so high because I was able to borrow so much money”
WTF? Can this lady run safely with scissors, is she allowed to cross the road on her own?
Alexis “unfortunately, nobody put the brakes on me except myself”
Jenni (incredulous tone of voice) “Hang on, what were you spending it on?”
Alexis “Anything, I genuinely was shopping constantly, I had this attitude that life is short, and if I wanted it I should have it, and we do live in this society where we are told, ‘Look at all these worderful things you can have’ look at all these wonderful things these celebrities have got, and why don’t you have it and if you can’t afford it just borrow the money”
Prof Sheila Crispin then goes on to say that people think that “if the bank is prepared to lend me 20,000, then I must be able to afford it.”
Since when did adults get infantilised in this way? There are some things that have hidden risks that are hard to gauge and quantify. But there’s not much that is hard about spotting the risk of borrowing £1000 when you can’t see a way to paying it back.
I’m not talking about to people unfortunate enough to lose their jobs, or have other unforeseen financial events catch them out. This was a woman who sounded coherent, reasonably intelligent and who had finally seen the error of her ways. But was she raised by wolves? Why didn’t her parents teach her the basics
all advertising is a story designed to make you want to spend
I’m sick of people of both genders blaming the banks for making them overspend. Banks have made their own mistakes, and been greedy on their own behalf, but they aren’t a conspiracy to make us overspend. They held up a mirror to our own greed and lack of responsibility. We cannot blame the mirror if the ugliness of the reflected image disturbs us. A failure of macroeconomic policy and regulation made this worse, but nobody had their arm twisted by a banker in a balaclava holding a gun to their head, saying
borrow this £31,000 or we shoot your husband and kids
It just didn’t happen.
Simple Living In Somerset 
In general I agree with you. But as that gets boring, I’d just add that I have been reading some research about how different brains work.
Basically as with so much it’s all a throwback to prehistoric times. Some brains want to wolf down the woolly mammoth steaks immediately, whereas others want to save it until the next Ice Age. Most are somewhere in between.
I first got interested in this because it’s always been trivially easy to save for me. It’s far far harder for me to spend. Whereas for a certain family member of mine it’s the complete opposite. It means we can’t have conversations about money, at all.
I’d love to believe it’s because I’m smart and morally superior but he’s clever and his morals are perhaps more conventionally superior to mine!
I’m prepared to believe I’m getting a leg up from my genes. Perhaps banks should have to take that into account.
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Agreed. Thank you for another well written post. IMHO The media has glamorised fiscal recklessness. Take that terrible programme sex and the city. It seems to me that SATC has had quite a powerful influence over women of a certain age. The show sends the message that it is hip and sexy to spend all your money on expensive shoes and sleep around and shop etc etc. Is this really the best we can do?? Are these the role models of the day? Is this really emancipation of women? Sorry but this is advertising and materialism shoved down our throat to the extreme.
I used to see women in the city walking down the street all looking for SATC, where is the individualism?
It is not just SATC. Switch on the TV and the lives of the rich and famous (or semi famous) are paraded before us. Why dont we have white straight teeth or an SUV or a detached mansion house? Why dont we have an agent and a driver?? What did the woman in the feature above say “look at all these things the celebrities have why havent I got them”. I rest my case.
I went off on a bit of a rant here but you get the idea 🙂
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@Monevator, you lucky devil if it ‘has always been easy to save for you’. My parents imparted the wisdom of avoiding debt save for non-depreciating assets like a mortgage. So half the job was easy for me, but finding my way to proactively saving was a fight for me to shake off consumerism, which took a few months.
@Dreamer, love the great one-liner about people in the city looking for SATC 🙂 The programme sounds truly dire, I’ve heard about it but never seen either the series or film. It sounds like consumerism on steroids. Celebs seem to be a nasty rash produced by consumerism 😉
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