It's not the end of the world, it's just money

I always thought that missing a payment or bouncing a check was like the end of the world. I remember the first time I bounced a check, it was because the bank made an error and told me I had more money than I really had, and stupid me believed them. I guess I should have sued or something, but I just cried about it and then spent the next couple of weeks working hard to pay off those stupid returned check fees. I got over it after several months, but that feeling of guilt and discomfort knowing that someone tried to take your money but it wasn't there just made me want to bury myself in a hole.

So I was thinking the other day about a conversation I had (as a result of someone blogging about how dumb it is that poor people spend all their money buying good things they can't afford and how credit cards allow them to do it and it sucks) about how if you owe money, it really means you're ending up paying a crapload of a lot more than whatever the thing you were trying to get was really worth. It's the interest that kills you. Someone was kind enough to let you have that car but is making you pay extra for it because you don't have all that money right this minute. Same with bounced checks, the bank helps you out in paying the check off, but then they charge you some fee for not having the money. You're basically paying extra for being careless, but so what? Is there also some secret process that I don't know about that puts you on a blacklist if you have a bad credit score or have bounced checks and they won't let you ride all the rides at Disneyland? Do they have a special place in heaven for good people who managed their money well during their entire life?

I don't know anyone who doesn't have some sort of debt (because I don't know any ridiculously rich people), but I don't think it really matters. You're not stupid if you have debt, you're not automatically smart if you don't. So what if you end up spending more money than you should have. I guess it's like if you go and buy something and then the next day you go to a different store and it's cheaper there. Maybe some people would go through the trouble of returning the thing to the first store (unless they're shoes, they don't like when you wear shoes and then try to return them) and then going to the second store to get the same thing for cheaper. Does it really make that much of a difference? Are things really better in the end? I really don't think it matters. Things like this are completely trivial compared to the rest of the things that are going on in the universe.