Whenever banks decide they won’t lend to you for no apparent reason (such as when you earn £22,000 a year and low outgoings, but can’t get a measly £5,000 loan to buy a car to get to work), they’ll tell you that it’s because they are ‘responsible lenders’ who will never lend you more than you can afford.
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Then they put out adverts like this one (taken from the Barclays website today). How the hell is this ‘responsible lending’? A credit card is not a toy! It is not something you ‘treat’ yourself to like a goddamn pedicure. It’s this sort of attitude from banks that is the reason why personal debt in the UK exceeded the value of the country’s GDP in August. The real reason I had trouble getting a loan 2 years ago was because I was nothing to do with them acting responsibly, but with covering their own backsides; I was 23, and therefore, in their eyes, likely to blow the money and never repay it. It’s not an unreasonable suspicion since this often happens, but it’s an attitude that the banks themselves are nurturing in their customers with adverts like this. |
It’s funny how while they wouldn’t lend me money at a reasonable rate, Barclaycard were quite happy to raise my credit card limit to more than 3 times my monthly salary at 25%+ interest. Pity for them that I’ve never borrowed money on my credit card, and probably never will…
