The plastic card of death ...er... debt

My dear colleague is arguing that debt isn’t so bad. After all, we all have it, right? The core of his argument is that money buys happiness.

But debt is money that you owe and therefore is not “your” money. Even if cash could really make people happy, it’s not their dough to begin with. One could therefore say that debt buys other people’s happiness and not yours.

As usual, my colleague is nuts.

Yes, we must spend money to make money, as the hackneyed cliché goes, and investment is crucial to reaping any sort of dividend or return. Since college students don’t have a lot of money, that investment is mostly the “sweat equity” of time spent doing homework, attending lectures and working a part-time job. The end result is, we all hope, a good start to life as fully-fledged grownups.

We have money — just not that much of it. So shouldn’t we be extra careful with how we use our already meager resources?

College loans are fine. That’s an investment in your future. If you’re smart about it, you can secure loans with low interest rates and plan ahead so your payment plan doesn’t grind you into little bits of frazzled dust in a sawmill of stress and overwork.

In contrast, credit cards tend to be evil. I’ll rephrase that. Those plastic slices of death are evil until proven innocent, at least in my bankbook.

Think about it.

You see a nice looking flat screen TV for your dorm room. You don’t need it, but you want it. So you buy it and put it on your handy credit card. The next day, you’re out hanging with your friends, when you all decide to go out to dinner at a fancy restaurant. You slam down your plastic sliver of debt after eating your fill and treat your buddies to a free meal. Pretty soon you’re buying cars, bass boats, small countries; you name it, it’s on credit.

Next you’re getting credit cards to pay for the credit cards that you already have, which is sort of like buying hand grenades to fix your grandmother’s heirloom china. You might stay financially solvent for a few more weeks, and then The Man will catch up.

This debt won’t go uncollected. Sooner or later we all have to pay our dues, literally or figuratively. And while our country has massive debt issues, we shouldn’t follow in our nation’s footsteps.

Debt is the enemy of the college student, the soul-sucking monster that will make your life miserable if you don’t take steps to deal with it now. If you accumulate debt, you’re basically feeding a voracious tiger while simultaneously sawing at the bars of its cage.

So cut up those cards, open that savings account and be careful with how you spend your precious money. You might be living in a cardboard box after you graduate, but you won’t have to pay anyone for it.

[Reach columnist Will Mari at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]

Credit cards totally buy happiness

Every day I read in the paper that our economy is going down the drain. The stock market is going to crash, the dollar bill will become a mere piece of paper, and all those years I’ve spent working in the “real world” will equate to absolutely nothing. Yet every time I go out shopping, I come home with enough goods to make it Christmas.

Best of all, I do it with money I don’t even have.

Therein lies the beauty of our economy, or more importantly, in credit cards. Credit cards give us the ability to believe that we are rich, even if we’re checking out textbooks from the library every week and stealing clothes from Laundromats.

What I don’t get is all the hubbub about the debt that we’re supposedly creating by buying stuff with money we don’t actually have. Especially since these are the same people that are warning us of imminent “depression.”

Which is odd, because the last time I checked, money buys happiness.

But why don’t they make up your minds already? Do they want us to spend money and create debt while boosting our economy, or would they rather we save up and help the debt but have the economy tumble?

Secondly, who cares? We’ve been in debt up to our ears for decades now, and every year our government is spending more and more money and putting us trillions of dollars more into debt. We’re so in debt that not even Bill Gates could help us get out of it.

So rather than sit here and pout about the inevitable crash of our economy, we should enjoy ourselves. We should be spending cash out the wazoo and buying everything we deem to be mildly unimportant but incredibly necessary.

It’s not as if we even have to try that hard to do so, either. For all of us out-of-state students, we just need to continue going to school and paying the ridiculous tuition rates. Not to mention living expenses, insurance, car payments and booze for the weekends. That alone will have us taking out loans for the next 40 years.

If they even still exist.

There should be no reason for you to not spend some extra dough here and there. Because if this whole debt crisis is to actually occur, it probably won’t happen for a while — in which case we just need draw it out until it becomes the next generation’s problem. I mean, that’s what the baby boomers are doing with global warming and Social Security, so why not pass on the favor to our own kids?

[Reach columnist Eric Uthus at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]