Debt-Ridden

I don’t quite know why, but the BBC website’s diary pieces by this woman trying to sort out her debt situation have managed to annoy me quite seriously.

My husband Thomas owns a French restaurant in Holborn, London.
To buy the restaurant, my husband and I had to re-mortgage the family home and my two small buy-to-let properties.

OK, fair enough, in some ways her situation is pretty crappy – dropped from her contract job because of being pregnant, for example – but I find it very hard to find much sympathy for someone who has bought her London home (and remortgaged it), has two other buy-to-let properties on mortgages, and has invested in her husband’s restaurant business. So that’s three mortgages, plus her husband’s one on the business premises, and various other debts, loans, etc. Again, fair enough, she’s not spending money all over the place, but still, three properties? (Four if you count the restaurant)

I dunno, the entire diary just strikes me as being more than a bit whingy, with an overtone of “It’s not fair!” running through it.

I do think that the way banks and lenders deal with people who are in debt – particularly the ones who are at least trying to deal with it, and keep them informed – is utterly scummy, but the phrase “Banks are fiscal-vampire scumsucking leeches” is never going to be headline material. And neither is the fact that their entire systems are gauged at getting as much money out of people as possible, while preferably being deeply inefficient, and going “lalalalala-can’t hear you” at potential problems.

Eventually, I suggest a year-long payment holiday, with interest frozen until I return to full time work after my maternity leave.

But it also strikes me that attitudes like that displayed in the quote above are perhaps unrealistic, naïve, and actually quite self-centred. Yeah, sure, a payment holiday for a year is a lovely idea. But I can’t think of any financial institution that’s going to turn round and say “Of course you can take a break for a year. And of course we won’t charge you interest in that time! Hey, why don’t we bake you a cake at the same time?” They’re businesses – they exist to make money. They’re not charities. OK, it would be nice if they were more understanding of situations and so on, but frankly it’s not going to happen.

I don’t really know what I’m trying to say here, or what I’m trying to get at. It’s just the entire set of ‘diary’ posts annoys me.

I’ll think more about it, and probably most some more thoughts about it some other time.