“I imagined what it would be like if that big check I wrote to a farmer bounced (it didn’t). They would be so upset! And it would cost them. And it would cost me. And I’d be obliged to pay their fees, too, and then I would be out a hundred bucks or something more than I planned and maybe I would have to pay my babysitter late and…
I had myself worked up, over what was unlikely to happen.”

Sounds like a thought experiment of a grown woman to me. I would argue the original article made a better connection between personal finance and difficult emotions like stress than this article attemps to make between PF and morality, however your mother comment was a real cheap shot.

I can see how someone might make the argument that the potentially bounced check could be a moral issue. But, it sounds like there were a lot of variables in the situation which makes it more of an accident in my opinion. No set amount of money needed, no specific time frame …. but, I also assume you gave little or no reason to the farmer to think you couldn’t pay on commmand. Eh, I think you’re fine here but it’s definitely a good object lesson about keeping more padding in your account and getting more details on transactions.

As for bankruptcies. Well, the devil is in the details. One of my good friends declared bankruptcy – almost entirely because of consumer debt and an ex-husband who would not pay the bills post divorce. On one hand, it’s not her fault he was tanking her credit at the same time he wasn’t paying his court-ordered share of the debt. On the other hand, why the heck did they rack up so much consumer debt in the first place (vehicles, motorcycles, four wheelers, leather furniture, home renovations, trips, clothes, etc)? So …. kind of immoral to get so far into debt, KNOWING that you can’t pay it all back. And, the kicker – once the bankruptcy and all the debt was discharged, she continued to buy more bikes and stuff. SMH Is that immoral? Eh, I suppose so. I can’t blame a person for thinking their debt was under control with 2 incomes, because you make decisions based on current intel but it was still irresponsible.

But, I agree with Liz Pulliam Weston. If it takes you longer to repay your debt than your credit score would be impacted by a bankruptcy, then file. If it takes less, then pay.

We all make mistakes and screw up, it’s natural. But sometimes we’re even better off than before making the mistake if we learn something substantial in the process.

Alice

People ask me if I am ADHD because I get super enthusiastic about new ideas.

I also break personal finance rules all the time, but I strive to have some sort of goal and guidance and route to take to make things better.

But there’s a lot of people out there who bounce checks intentionally. It’s not a one time occurrence. It’s a “lets see if I Can stick it to the man” mindset. This is indeed immoral.

And we can look though the world of personal finance to find lots of other immoral activities. Like a friend of mine who buys something, uses it once, and then returns it. Or people who intentionally default on their mortgage even though the can make the payments.

If we’re talking morality and personal finance, let’s talk about walking out on a house that’s underwater, even though you can still afford it. Moral or not? If you think it’s immoral, and choose to do the moral thing, then how much are your morals costing you?

In the same lines, could talk about bankruptcy. Many well-off people have no problems filing bankruptcy on one of their businesses (which is always structured to lower the personal liability to virtually nil); so how much is the average joe’s morality costing him when he’s drowning in debt but chooses not to take the “easy” way out? What is it costing him in terms of providing for his family, helping his kids with college expenses, retirement?

Could touch on other things such as “borrowing” from Wal-Mart courtesy of their 90-day return policy, downloading movies/shows illegally, not trying to find the owner of the envelope with $10k in it, etc.

But instead, we get an article about how we either have to agree that writing a possibly bad check is NOT immoral, or that tripping on a tree root IS immoral. Um, what? I am curious if the writer had overdraft protection on her account, because if so…then technically the check could not have been bad (had the account become overdrawn, the bank would have “lent” the funds, possibly at a very usurious rate). Making the entire argument moot. Ooh, maybe that’ll be the next article? “All you haters, I had overdraft protection, so suck it!” Nah, surely GRS isn’t spiraling downward, where the new owners are only interested in a quick buck (and articles that get people riled up, and cause a brief spike in viewers, are the order of the day).

While it’s not pleasant to read negative comments, I think these ganging-up-on comments happen as a red-flag that something doesn’t sound right in the article. In the end, I’m sure we all want the best for Sarah, even if our screaming tactic is quite annoying, rude and deafening– we could behave better.

I don’t consider bankruptcy immoral unless someone intentionally borrows a lot of money with the intent of going bankrupt. As a student of the Bible, I have read that when God created a government, all the people in the country were to go bankrupt every seven years and every forty-nine years, real estate was to revert back to the family to whom it was originally allotted.

Both things essentially reset the economy and kept things from getting too out of balance. I believe our bankruptcy laws were intended to do something similar and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Also, if a poor borrower left his cloak with a lender as collateral, it was the lender’s responsibility to return the borrower’s cloak to him every evening in case he did not have any other blankets and would be cold at night without it. People don’t talk much about that kind of thing, which I find curious.

As to the original comment about being immoral, while the word choice may be off, the commentor was merely attempting to distinguish between accidents and intentional decisions where another person also bears the risk. In the decision to write a check to the pig farmer, knowing you may or may not be able to cover the check, you transferred the risk to the pig farmer and likely without telling the pig farmer. (Unless you said, “Here is my check, but give it 3 days to make sure it clears.”) The problem with this is IF it bounced, the pig farmer would think he had $900 in the bank and it takes 2 weeks or more to find out a check you deposited bounced. Thus, pig farmer may have suddenly had $900 less and had to go even longer before he actually the money back. That is completely different from an accident where you fall and damage your own stuff. And it is different from a car accident.

If you want a better analogy, the $900 check would be like a car accident where you loaded up you car so full that you can’t see out the rear window. And, although you know you have blind spots, especially with the rear window blocked, you back up onto a busy street anyway, not asking somebody to make sure you are clear. You know there are risks that another person will bear the cost of your decision but you act anyway because you figure it’s late and unlikely that somebody will be coming by at that exact time.

This article feels so self-serving, and so defensive. It is a whole article dedicated to responding to a commentor that said you messed up. If you don’t want to be judged, why do you publicly write? We judge and evaluate our own behavior, the behavior of others, the world we live in–what do we NOT judge and evaluate? If you ask people to stop judging and evaluating, people will stay static–which is the opposite goal of this site. We shouldn’t determine a person is evil because he or she made a decision that wasn’t right, but that’s a concept that we all get.

It really seems that you simply didn’t like the word choice of a person who commented and are attempting to convert that disagreement in terminology/vocabulary into an entire post about how you didn’t mess up at all.

It’s such an easy thing to do, especially if we’ve been fortunate enough to avoid a similar mistake (I know it’s, unfortunately, almost a knee-jerk response for me). Apologies for highlighting this comment, but here you say:

“She’s damaged her phone twice, but doesn’t save up money for repairs. She essentially spends money she doesn’t have, then expects to be forgiven the consequences.”

I don’t think that’s a fair judgment. A judgment which, if it were made about me, would be pretty hurtful/insulting. Things break, people fall, life happens. Part of personal finance is trying to get to a secure place where we’ll always have the money for a replacement, but no one’s finances will ever be criticism-proof.

Forums like this become less productive/ helpful when filled with negativity. I’m not saying that no one should ever point out when an author isn’t taking responsibility (or that an author should be protected from all criticism), just that being polite or empathetic doesn’t have to take away from our message. There’s a lot of anger in many of these comments, especially given the fact that the check didn’t even bounce.

We all want the same thing here: to get rich slowly. Let’s try to be nice people along the way.

/steps off soapbox

Sure, it is more responsible to minimize risk, but even a slightly elevated risk may still be reasonably deemed acceptable. You don’t stay home from work every time it rains, do you? Even though that makes the roads slipperier? And you still drive at all, right? Wouldn’t it be safer to give it up entirely?

There is no hard-and-fast cutoff for when you’ve crossed the line from reasonable to unacceptable risk, and, “everything *I* do is reasonable, everyone riskier than I is unacceptable, everyone less risky than I is overly cautious,” is not a real metric, even though it’s how most people seem to operate.

Driving is much, much safer than thousands of different things people have done throughout the course of history, and those people all deemed their activities to be worth the risk. This includes everything from working in 19th century factories, to emigrating across oceans on wooden boats with no engines, to fishing in Alaska.

Things can always be safer than they are. That doesn’t mean you need to blame the victim if anything ever goes wrong because he wasn’t acting safely enough.

It’s important to support your own opinion of what you do and what goes on in your life. It doesn’t mean you never change and grow and see the mistakes you may have made. But it does mean you don’t attack and blame yourself for what you feel is right.

This blog has been helpful for me. Some of the articles and posts have helped me in saving money. But virtually NONE of the nasty posts have helped me in the least, and I simply pass them over. Some people are truly troubled, and may use posts like yours to try to make you feel as worthless as possible. The point for them is not to ENLIGHTEN, it’s to ATTACK. It seems to make them feel better, especially when they do it as a group. Think of the worst clique in, say, high school–or even middle school. That’s the maturity level we’re often dealing with here. Extremely toxic. What is even sadder is that some of the same people are actually PARENTS, and I think, TEACHERS, which is frightening. What kind of example are they actually setting?

One of the best lessons I learned when my children were younq, was that compassion, caring, support and limits, were worth their weight in gold as far as they (and the friends they brought home) were concerned. It never helped to make them feel worse. NEVER.

My hope is that you’ll surround yourself with supportive people who offer CONSTRUCTIVE feedback. I like your posts and hope you’ll continue writing–if not here, then somewhere where I’ll get the chance to follow your journey. Wishing you the best!

As much as I hate to quote Kant, he does hold that in our actions we should treat others as ends in themselves, and not as mere means.

In the pig example, Sarah treated the farmer as a mere means to an end — getting a pig to impress her friends.

And so much of those violations seem to happen through a lack of honesty. If Sarah had been honest with the farmer, or her friends, or herself, she’d know not to write a bad check, be the one responsible for the pig, or post this on a blog about getting rich slowly.

There were a lot of options available that give more of Sarah’s privately held information to the people in the transaction — the farmer, her friends, her bank. If she’d done any of these, she wouldn’t need to rationalize writing a bad check.