Lifestyles of the formerly rich and still impatient

March 21st, 2009 at 07:56pm Annette LaCross

If there is one thing a decade of easy lending creates, in addition to financial markets that are either paralyzed or collapsing, it’s a sense of entitlement.

It began with the carefully cultivated notion that money no longer needed to be earned — indeed, it was free. It no longer belonged only to an elite class of people we could only envy.

Suddenly, we were, all of us, rich. We needed only to ask and piles of money appeared before us.

So we asked, delighted to find ourselves in lifestyles to which we were completely unaccustomed, to learn that our parents were wrong when they told us money didn’t grow on trees.

At some point, such abundance became less a novelty, more a perquisite. It was nothing more than what we deserved, after all.

Today, with the economy derailed and any sort of recovery months or years away, we find ourselves dancing around a grim reality we don’t really want to see.

To forestall facing it, we have resorted to asking two questions over and over. The problem, of course, is that they’re the wrong questions.

We are first demanding — after all, we have every right to demand answers when our right to free money has been violated — the identities of the culprits responsible. These days, we seem comfortable pointing to various executives at failed insurer American International Group because of the billions of dollars in bonuses they were given.

And when they become old news, as they inevitably will, we’ll find someone else — someone even more responsible. Probably the federal government, always a good scapegoat because we are so accustomed to letting Uncle Sam take over when the going gets tough.

The second question — I get this one a lot — is when this is going to be over. It took me a few frustrating attempts at an answer before I realized what the real question is: When am I going to be rich again?

These are the wrong questions because we are determined to not hear the answers, which are, in a nutshell: 1) We are. 2) Not for a while.

We felt rich because we saddled ourselves with so much debt, which lenders are loath to approve these days. We forgot it wasn’t real money — that real money, sadly, must be earned. But we are desperate to clutch our illusion of wealth close. Why wouldn’t we? We liked being rich.

But the longer we put off accepting the answers, the more it will prolong the inevitable realization: There’s no such thing as free money.

Contact Business Editor Annette LaCross at alacross@rrstar.com or 815-987-1295.

Entry Filed under: Bailout money, Banks