Cultured Views

Staying sane while in debt

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I was reading a rather sad article just this morning; sad in that the situation is just so common these days and affecting families everywhere who otherwise should be reaping the rewards of having worked and saved hard to offer their kids a decent standard of living.

This lady, a widow with three young kids, documented her heartbreaking quest to sell her family home and just how impossible it was becoming due to the world wide credit crunch. She was heavily in debt, almost unmanageably so, and had made the decision to sell the home and move elsewhere - with even the kids having to change schools. It is not easy and her story is not uncommon. When ordinary folk have to sell their beloved family home just to secure some debt relief they find themselves in a desperate situation and many are also finding themselves being held over a barrel by greedy property buyers and real estate agents aiming to take advantage of their plight.

I think it is very sad and makes you extremely angry that this is the situation today; the fact is that it is the hard working folk who are feeling the pinch most of all. We all need to borrow and use credit at some stage and perhaps it has been too easily obtained in the past. Maybe the lenders need to accept some responsibility for their part in cases like this lady’s; too much borrowing in the past has now seen a huge growth in those seeking other forms of finance in the form of debt consolidation. And the result…? borrowing from Peter to pay Paul…

It also makes me angry that there are always other’s out there to capitalise on these people’s unfortunate situation. Property buyers know that a person is desperate to sell their house so they gradually tighten the screws on them, asking for the price to be dropped again and again…and again. The lady I mentioned above was so in need of getting a sale that she agreed to successive demands to drop the price of her home until she was selling at a price 25% lower than the original asking price.

Then the buyer pulled out at the ‘eleventh hour’. Makes you want to scream eh?

But this is just one story in what must be hundreds of thousands of similar cases - it is happening everywhere. And that people have to sell up and move in order to consolidate debt - knowing they will come out of the transaction with very little equity in the end - is a very sad sign of our times.

We are all told to ‘tighten our belts’ until the economy gets better - but how much tighter can most of us go…?

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