We Have No Right To Money

For the last 5 years or so it’s been extremely easy for people and business to access capital from lending institutions.  How many times have you seen advertisements for credit cards, bank loans, and 0% no payment financing in the last 12 months.  I’d venture to say that you’ve seen it 10 times a day, each and everyday.  Financial companies have launched massive advertising campaigns that flood Mailboxes, T.V.’s, Magazines, and the Internet with offers trying to put money into our hands.  We’ve become so accustomed to these offers that it’s created this feeling of entitlement to accessing credit whenever it’s needed.  No longer do people see getting a loan as a privilege, it’s created a sense that it’s a right.

I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say “if I need some extra money I can always throw it on a credit card” or “I get 10 offers a day in my mailbox to get money, I’m even pre-approved!”.  This mentality of access to credit at any given moment has slowly began to change as more and more people are realizing that borrowing money is not a right, it’s actually a privilege.  By little fault of consumers, why shouldn’t we believe that credit is a right?  For the last couple of years you could get massive amounts of money without providing a single piece of information about what you plan to purchase and even worse how you plan to pay for it!  Now that the credit markets have basically frozen, people are again being asked to prove the need for money and prove how they plan to repay.  This is a relatively new concept to many people, and it’s not sitting well.

There’s a need for more diligence by banks with respect to making sure debt that is acquired by a customer will be repaid and what that debt is being used to purchase.  Gone, for now, are the times that money was basically growing on trees and access to credit was effortless.  It’s time to look at borrowing money as a privilege and not as a right.  This is a healthy approach to creating a strong economy and insuring financial security for the future.  If financial companies don’t take this approach we will quickly find ourselves with another round of bailouts and asking ourselves how we got into this mess.