I walked in the office of my chiropractor this past Monday and he handed me a flyer which was a reprint of the Jane Bryant Quinn article in Newsweek Magazine, The Case for Walking Away.
Later, when I got a chance to read the article I was, for the lack of a better term, appalled by what I felt was Jane Bryant Quinn’s cavalier attitude toward personal fiscal responsibility. I mean, I understand that times are hard and that some of us are in dire financial straits and in some cases actually drowning in debt.
Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I had always been taught that if I incurred a debt obligation, it was my responsibility to satisfy that obligation. I watched my mother continue to make payments on a house that the City of Baltimore had taken from her under eminent domain. Her lender, the VA, wasn’t willing to forgive the debt or reduce her payments. So for ten years, after her house had been torn down by the city she continued to make payments on a house that didn’t exist anymore. Meanwhile she also struggled to pay rent on the house that my brother and I grew up in. Thirty days after she made her last payment on the now non-existent house, the VA sent her a release of liability and thanked her for paying her debt. The lesson I learned from all of this was that if you borrow there is no acceptable excuse for not repaying.
Ms. Quinn advocates walking away from your debt by filing bankruptcy and starting over. Now I don’t begrudge anyone who has had to struggle with the decision and the horror of filing personal bankruptcy. It takes years to rebuild your credit once you do and you’ll end up overpaying in comparison to others for all the services you finance. Again, maybe it’s my age, but I always believed that bankruptcy, regardless of which chapter you file, should be a last resort, not as Ms. Quinn suggest: a first option.
In short, I found the article disturbing and sending the wrong message. And yet as I read the more than 450 comments that are attached to this article, I can’t help but wonder if I’m on the wrong side of this issue.
I have a lot of respect for Jane Bryant Quinn, but I can’t help but think that this time she got it wrong. Seriously wrong.
I’m not sure she was advocating it as a first option. I took away from the article that, if someone has reached a point in their financial instability that they are going to lose everything in paying off their debts and still will have to file bankruptcy, filing earlier will, as it were, help them carry more things out before the house burns down. Of course, I think everyone has seen that abused, too. I had a cousin who decided to fil, so he and his wife bought a bunch of things so they’d have them when they filed. This was presented to Young Me as cousin being a Grade-A jerk, and I tend to agree, not least because I thought even then that if he’d been less of an idiot, none of it would have been necessary. Your mother was much stronger on personal responsibility than a lot of people in the same position would have been. Eminent domain sucks.
Perhaps you’re correct in the ultimate take-a-way from this and you are certainly right about eminent domain. 🙂 I just hate (with capital letters) the concept that it’s possible to walk away from personal responsibility and some how benefit. This isn’t a mass indictment of those who use the system as intended but about those who abuse it.