Hubby sent me this NY Times magazine article, which will appear in Sunday's paper. It's written by one of their economic reporters.

If there was anybody who should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, it was I. As an economics reporter for The New York Times, I have been the paper’s chief eyes and ears on the Federal Reserve for the past six years. I watched Alan Greenspan and his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, at close range. I wrote several early-warning articles in 2004 about the spike in go-go mortgages. Before that, I had a hand in covering the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Russia meltdown in 1998 and the dot-com collapse in 2000. I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us.

But in 2004, I joined millions of otherwise-sane Americans in what we now know was a catastrophic binge on overpriced real estate and reckless mortgages. Nobody duped or hypnotized me. Like so many others — borrowers, lenders and the Wall Street dealmakers behind them — I just thought I could beat the odds. We all had our reasons. The brokers and dealmakers were scoring huge commissions. Ordinary homebuyers were stretching to get into first houses, or bigger houses, or better neighborhoods. Some were greedy, some were desperate and some were deceived.

As for me, I had two utterly compelling reasons for taking the plunge: the money was there, and I was in love. It was August 2004, just as the mortgage party was getting really good. I was 48 years old and eager to start a new chapter in my life with Patricia Barreiro, who was then my fiancée.

Or in other words, "I was stupid, and I was stupid."

He and his bride need a house large enough for their brood, her two youngest kids and his teenage sons on the weekends. So, OK, they need something with a little room. I get that. They find a perfect home in Silver Spring, MD, and it's "only" $460,000. The trouble is...

Having separated from my wife of 21 years, who had physical custody of our sons, I was handing over $4,000 a month in alimony and child-support payments. That left me with take-home pay of $2,777, barely enough to make ends meet in a one-bedroom rental apartment. Patty had yet to even look for a job. At any other time in history, the idea of someone like me borrowing more than $400,000 would have seemed insane.

So he's paying more than half of his salary in child support, his new wife doesn't even have a job, but instead of looking for something more reasonable...

My real estate agent gave me the number of Bob Andrews, a loan officer at American Home Mortgage Corporation. Bob wasn’t related to me, and I had never heard of his company. “Bob can be very helpful,” my agent explained. “He specializes in unusual situations.”

Bob returned my call right away. “How big a mortgage do you think you’ll need?” he asked.

“My situation is a little complicated,” I warned. I told him about my child support and alimony payments and said I was banking on Patty to earn enough money to keep us afloat. Bob cut me off. “I specialize in challenges,” he said confidently....

...Bob called back the next morning. “Your credit scores are almost perfect,” he said happily. “Based on your income, you can qualify for a mortgage of about $500,000.”

What about my alimony and child-support obligations? No need to mention them. What would happen when they saw the automatic withholdings in my paycheck? No need to show them. If I wanted to buy a house, Bob figured, it was my job to decide whether I could afford it. His job was to make it happen.

“I am here to enable dreams,” he explained to me long afterward. Bob’s view was that if I’d been unemployed for seven years and didn’t have a dime to my name but I wanted a house, he wouldn’t question my prudence. “Who am I to tell you that you shouldn’t do what you want to do? I am here to sell money and to help you do what you want to do. At the end of the day, it’s your signature on the mortgage — not mine.”

This is the kind of BS that the Republicans are always railing about. It's exactly this. The writer knows this is fishy. He can do the math. He's not an uneducated person who doesn't grasp his situation and gets sold on something he can't afford by a shady broker. And this guy Bob sounds extremely shady. But the writer is abetting him in this.

As I walked out of the settlement office with my loan papers, I couldn’t shake the sense of having just done something bad . . . but also kind of cool. I had just come up with almost a half-million dollars, and I had barely lifted a finger. It had been so easy and fast. Almost fun. I couldn’t help feeling like a high roller, a sophisticated player who could lay his hands on big money at a moment’s notice. Despite my nagging anxiety about the gamble that Patty and I were taking, I had whipped through the pile of loan documents in less than 45 minutes.

Five months after they buy the house, the writer realizes he's got only $200 in the bank. How on earth did this happen?

We had very different ideas about money. Patty spent little on herself, but she refused to scrimp on top-quality produce, Starbucks coffee, bottled juices, fresh cheeses and clothing for the children and for me. She regularly bought me new shirts and ties to replace the frayed and drab ones in my closet. She thought it wasn’t worth agonizing over nickels and dimes. I was almost exactly the opposite. My answer to any money squeeze was to stop spending. I would skip lunch at work to save $7. If I arrived at the Metro just before the end of rush hour, I would wait for five minutes to save 50 cents on the fare....

...Meanwhile, neither of us was paying attention to how easy our bank had made it to build up debt. The key was the overdraft protection — more accurately described as “bounced-check loans.” Every time I overdrew my checking account by even a few dollars, the bank would tap my MasterCard for $100, helpfully deposit the cash in my account and charge me $10 for the privilege.

These are supposedly intelligent people. It's not like they went broke because of medical bills, or they're trying to keep food on the table.

In the previous December alone, we charged $2,845 on the Chase card for Christmas gifts, food, gasoline, clothing and other expenses. The charges included almost $350 for groceries, $700 in clothes from J. Crew, $179 at GapKids and $700 for airplane tickets for two of Patty’s children to visit their father in Los Angeles. Our balance climbed from $14,118 to $17,135, and in January 2006 we maxed out at our $19,000 credit limit. And there were other expenses on other cards: $1,200 in dental work for Patty’s son Ben; $1,600 to rent a beach house the previous year for us and all the children. Granted, the beach house was an embarrassing mistake. But given that Patty had landed a solid job, it seemed like an indulgence we could work off later.

The guy knows they're in trouble, he's waiting five minutes on the subway to save on the fare, yet they rented a beach house.

I know this is written for the Times' readership. I'm sure there'll be quite a few folks shedding a tear as they read this over their coffee on Sunday morning. We're supposed to sympathize with the author, but all I can think is, "You. Moron."

As my Hubs said, "Basically, imagine that you didn't have a job and that I had to pay $4,000 a month in alimony, and we live in a house that cost $400k. Oh, and we have three kids. If we were in that situation, would we be renting a beach house? I don't think so... "

But hey, it's OK. The author got a book deal out of it. That should cover this year's beach house rental.