We should not have a system in place for most instances of financial difficulties. You may come up with some extreme examples that might warrent such a social system, but for the most part, financial difficulties are a product of the consequences of an ongoing series of bad decisions.
Your Scrooge-like opinion is noted.
We could easily feed and house and provide education and healthcare to everyone.
We can't do that and continue our endless warfare overseas though.
I should of known. What I was talking about had nothing to do with feeding, housing, educating, and bandaiding the masses. When I hear someone talking about financial difficulties and credit scores, it's usually regarding people making enough money to afford debt but not enough discipline to avoid excessive debt. In other words, the whole subject matter to which I'm speaking of is substantially different than what you are.
Some people (in the middle class) make choices, and though them choices by themselves may be both affordable and sensible when looked at in isolation, there is a cumulative effect that speaks to future financial difficulties. People usually talk of the most recent financial woes as the reasoning behind their financial gloom, but like the straw that broke the camels back, it's not the most recent straw but the effects of the cumulative weight that brings the back crashing down, hence, it's the multitude of decisions that seem okay at the time that really lies at the heart of most (middle class) financial difficulties.
If people were properly educated on the psychology behind their spending habits, for example, and if they were spoon-fed the essential habit forming exercises on money-management as children ... and learned and lived the smart decisions to make, then most financial difficulties would never come to bare.
I'll tell ya something else, it's not all about living within means, though it would make for a better state of financial affairs. There are rich people who couldn't manage money to save their lives but make enough to outpace their spending, and the lack of discipline for those will show like a beacon in the night when their income substantially declines.
People live on the foggy edge of financial disaster, but they cannot see the cliff because they aren't suffering from the fall. People aren't necessarily stupid, just ignorant--they have the ability, just not the know-how, but even that's not enough, as evidenced by the plethora of people who can but don't succeed financially, and that has everything to do with the absence of self-forcing principled financial decision making, that is developed over time or after complete financial melt-downs--and even then many people never get it ... so busy living for the moment when comfortable and see no edge in the foggy night.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for living now while we can, but a little bit of compromised postponement of pleasure can go a long way to financial freedom. With some right decisions and right frame of mind, people can have things they never dreamed of and go places they never thought they would ...and make for happier marriages and families.
When people talk about (oh say), getting out of debt, for example ... I'm talking about when they hit a pivitol moment when they become determined, what do they do: they look for the best plan to do so. WHO THE HELL NEEDS THE BEST PLAN? Hell, a half baked mediocra plan is more than sufficient once they've conquered the one thing that MOST OFTEN holds them back: themselves.
The difficulties that arise from severe lack of money management life skills are the financial difficulties I was talking about not needing a social backing for. Okay?
