Post 3--Your Dough

POST 3—November 15, 2013

Your Dough

What kind of a trip am I on? you may well ask. Blog 2 is about death and now about dough, meaning, of course, money!  It’s a subject that lends itself to all kinds of moralisms, warnings, finger wagging, guilt trips and reams of more negative stuff. Why such negative topics so early in this blog?  Should you move on to more positive ventures?

Well, no! I told you the choice of topics I will be discussing is often, if not mostly, picked from current events and issues. November 2013 happens to be Financial Literacy Month in Canada. Not just literacy. That gets its own month, at least, in British Columbia (BC), my province. This one is about financial literacy.  Literacy campaigns try to overcome illiteracy and ignorance; financial literacy tells us that there is serious financial ignorance. The Canadian government has discovered that such ignorance has reached alarming levels in this so-called advanced country and is using this campaign as one of its tools to overcome it.

The Vancouver Sun highlighted the campaign with an article featuring a secondary school teacher who had fallen into the debt trap. A secondary school teacher. In other words, an intelligent person. I can find only one word adequate to describe his financial behaviour as he personally describes it, but I am loathe to use it, since some of my grandchildren have been forbidden to use it: stupid. He “over-indulged” his children with “the very best designer cloths and toys,” all the while living “from month to month.” He managed this stupidity with a whole raft of credit cards, “all maxed to the limit.”

Fortunately, he came to his senses when he reached bottom and now “shakes his head and wonders how his spending habits could have become so skewed. He wonders how he strayed so far from a path of responsible spending established within his family.”  He was, in the words of Yvonne Zacharias, the writer of the Sun article, “swept up in the debt tempest” that now has Canada worried, for his is an increasingly typical situation. 

Canadians are slipping “deeper into debt,” with “the ratio of household debt to household income” having hit “a record high of 163.4 per cent,” a level “alarmingly” similar to America’s just before the 2008 crash. No wonder different levels of government are taking steps to bring some rationality into this mess—and responsibility.

By means of this and occasional subsequent blogs I hope to contribute to the government’s campaign, but promise not to make it too heavy or dreary. In the next blog I will share a few similar situations I have come across myself, along with a few comments. I’ll move on after that, but fully intend to get back to the topic now and then.

In closing, a little smile.  I came across a cartoon by Jeff Keane under his rubric “Family Circus,” in which a boy seeks his father’s advice: “Daddy, I want to help the ‘conomy. Should I spend my nickel or save it?” There you go!

But before I go, congrats to our intelligent secondary school teacher for having dug himself out of his hole. 

(The Vancouver Sun material in this article is from Yvonne Zacharias’ “Climbing a Mountain of Debt,” November 2, 2013.)