Abstract
This is a brief concluding chapter with some final insights. Also offers some relevant takeaways and suggestions for debt management in the twenty-first century. Introduces and explains a “goldilocks” concept of optimal debt management.
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Notes
- 1.
Yes, I know there is absolutely no evidence that a Puritan would be opposed to running up large credit card debts, but it just feels that way. In fact there is a legitimate claim that the Puritan work ethic or philosophy is at the core and foundation of modern capitalism. See, for example, the writing of sociologist Max Weber and so on.
- 2.
I have written and reported elsewhere (e.g. see my article in the National Post on April 5, 2016) that Canadian households with one additional dollar of debt on their personal balance sheet, relative to identical Canadians who do not have the extra dollar of liabilities, also have an additional 0.35 cents of equity or net worth. And this effect is actually more pronounced for households who rent as opposed to those who own their residence, so you can’t chalk this all up (only) to increasing real estate prices. For example, households with debts over $200,000 have a median net worth of $377,000. But those with debts over $600,000 are at $1,172,000. Remember, this is net worth (E), not assets (A), in the basic E = A − L relationship I alluded to in Chap. 1.
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Milevsky, M.A. (2017). Concluding Thoughts for the Twenty-First Century. In: The Day the King Defaulted. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59987-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59987-8_7
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