In the run-up to the financial collapse, people over-leveraged themselves to acquire more and more homes in order to cash in on ‘flipping’ them, never realizing that the housing bubble might pop and that they would be stuck with multiple properties they could not afford. Other people overreached in the purchase of their primary homes by acquiring loans that in the long term would crush them.
When all this came to a head, the economy collapsed. We’re still untangling ourselves from the mess of debt and liability that resulted. A renewed societal stigma against highly-leveraged purchases and towards paying down debt and increasing personal savings seems to be an obvious and healthy corrective, right?
Or maybe not.
What if we instead celebrated different types of financial situations, from an open-mindedness about being underwater on your home mortgage to the warm messiness of a bankruptcy caused by buying a second home through an interest-only loan. That may sound ridiculous, but it mirrors Katie Roiphe’s logic to how society should view family structure. Roiphe’s latest NY Times piece makes the case that her family structure is good because it exists, and um…
BIASBREAKDOWN 