On the other hand, one group of people who should care is the investors who come up with the money; they definitely won’t end up with as much as they thought (and they probably thought they were getting much higher returns with no extra risk). There’s a few lessons here but it’s really all common sense.

What I would say is the biggest change is that you really need to decide on your own if you can afford to borrow the money that’s available to you.

When it comes to credit cards, I use mine for everything I can to get reward points. I’m sure some people wonder about it but let them imagine anything they want – I have a constant stream of money going in to keep the balance low and avoid interest.

Business exist primarily for short term returns these days and banks are no exception. Shareholders don’t necessarily care whoat the model is for making money, as long as they continue to make money. It leaves me glad that I’m not one to carry a balance on my credit card.

I was raised by young parents who had NO money until I was in my teens, but they used credit cards. Mom paid them off every month, and always told me that if you don’t pay them off, you are getting yourself into big trouble. So in my world, I just assumed everyone paid them off every month and it never would have occurred to me that people didn’t. I (obviously) found out later that most people revolve balanced, but by the time I learned that, the stigma was already gone.

There was also a line in there somewhere about lawmakers considering plans to make lenders only loan to people whom they actually expected to be able to repay the loan- I was blown away by that! But I guess it makes perfect sense given what we have seen with the subprime mess and whatnot. It’s clearly an industry out of control.