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Thanks to everyone who contributed to the discussion about who is to blame for poor money management skills that lead individuals, especially younger people, into debt and other financial problems. Do we blame the individual solely? The parents, school system, or government? Or does the fault reside with the “evil” credit card companies who use clever marketing?

Here are some of the thoughts presented by commenters. Broadway says:

I believe that any blame must be assigned equally to all parties. Attempting to point a finger at one entity and assigning all or most of the blame to it is what is wrong with society. There are no quick fixes or easy solutions. Society is complex… One solution that I believe will attack the cause(s) is to teach critical thinking skills early (and often) in our educational system.

S/100/30 says:

There’s a lot of discussion about how parents don’t teach their children “about money,” but I think the problem goes far beyond whether parents fail to explicitly discuss compounding interest with their children — the astounding number of parents who actively encourage their children to spend money foolishly on image.

MillionDollarCountdown takes responsibility:

From my point of view its personal responsibility. No one forces me to buy anything. Yes, I know there are advertisements and the peer pressure. But all said and done its me who pulled out the credit card.

Others say:

* “There is ONLY ONE THING TO BLAME (if you must call it that) and it is GREED!”
* “Maybe there really is nobody to blame. CC companies operate within the law… I think it’s the responsibility of parents and our educational system to do a better job of teaching people how to manage their finances.”
* “Yes, the CC companies are taking advantage of people that simply are not educated on the issue of personal finance. But is it really their responsibility to ensure that their customers do not abuse the credit they have?… I attended a top notch private college preparatory school… it is inexcusable that they never touched on the issue of personal finance. I think it should be mandatory.”
* “[U]nless we do something to change the sort of thinking that says new clothes are more important than a $0 balance, the debtors are going to outweigh the rest of us.”

Finally, here are my thoughts. [click to continue…]

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There’s a discussion at StopBuyingCrap about credit card companies’ evil tacticts. In fact, Cap comes clean with this humble admission:

No body forced me to buy the mountains of Japanese comic books, computer hardware, and automotive parts. Sure, the credit card made it easier for me to spend money I didn’t have — but the reason why I spent frivolously was because I was a complete moron.

An anonymous commenter responded to Cap’s post:

Yes, personal responsibility is important. Many young people, however, have never been taught thing one about managing money. They simply don’t understand how it works. The companies take advantage of that. There are thousands of people who sit in their offices all day thinking up new ways to take advantage of that.

I tried to respond with my thoughts, but it was 3:45 am, so it didn’t come out completely the way I intended. So I’ll expand on this a bit.

This is an age-old debate. Whose fault is it that people go deeper into debt? Is it the young adult who lacks the basic math skills to understand the effects of compound interest? Perhaps it is the credit card companies whose marketing efforts, especially on college campuses, may be excessive? Can we turn to the primary and secondary school administrators who feel that money management cannot be shoved into an already-packed schedule? And then there are the parents, who perhaps fail to model appropriate behavior (implicit teaching) or explicitly teach their kids about handling money.

Obvisouly someone should be blamed when college students graduate with thousands of dollars in credit card debt, debt they have little to show for as it the money probably went to clothes that don’t last, food, entertainment, and status symbols that become old quickly.

I’ll pose this question to my readers before going any further. Who deserves all of the blame? If not all, who deserves most of it? Are the credit card companies and marketers evil when they prey on young “minds?” I touched this topic a while ago when I asked the question of the day, but now I want to know exactly what is wrong with society, where it fails, so we can fix the problem and move on.

Please share your opinion, and in a follow-up post, I’ll write a bit about what I believe, hopefully more coherently than how I commented on StopBuyingCrap.

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