Hey, looks like I'm back! All I needed was something substantive to voice my opinion on.

And today it's Edmund Andrews of the NY Times again. Two weeks ago I linked to Andrews' piece in the magazine, about poor Edmund and his poor new bride, and how they just wanted a little love nest of their own. So he willingly signed up for a mortgage he knew he could not afford. Not surprisingly he and his new wife spent themselves into a hole -- not because of health expenses or anything dire like that. No, because they spent $1600 for a week at a beach house.

Best of all, poor Edmund has spun his "cautionary tale" into a book deal. We can spend $17 and help bail out poor old Edmund.

Since the article appeared, Megan McCardle from the Atlantic discovered that:

...Patty Barreiro, Andrews' wife, has declared bankruptcy twice. The second time was while they were married, a detail that didn't make it into either the book or the excerpt that ran in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Andrews' desire to shield his wife is understandable--hell, laudable. No decent person wants to parade their spouse's financial trouble in front of the world. But this is material information that changes the tenor of his story. Serial bankruptcy is not a creation of the current credit crisis, and it doesn't just happen to anyone, particularly anyone with a six figure salary.

In September 1998, California bankruptcy court records indicate that Patty and her first husband declared bankruptcy. The financial statement they filed with the court indicated family income of $174,000 in 1996, $87,000 in 1997, and $126,000 in the first nine months of 1998. The income fluctuations are not surprising, given that her husband was in the film production industry. By the time of the filing, the couple owed about $30,000 on 8 credit cards, over $200,000 in back taxes, and almost $15,000 in private school tuition, as well as substantial car and mortgage payments.

In 2007, nearly as soon as she was eligible, Patty Barreiro filed again in Montgomery Country. When called for comment yesterday, Andrews was unavailable, but there is no question that it is his wife: his income and occupation are prominently featured in the docket.

And best of all, the letters have started to come in about the article to the magazine. Most are annoyed or "disgusted." But some actually praise the guy:

The excruciating details of Edmund L. Andrews’s personal finances, combined with his reputation as an economics journalist, make this a courageous essay. The story is especially powerful because he does not portray the mortgage broker or lender employees as villains.

The entire country was lulled into a materialistic mind-set in recent years, and the tale is a sober reminder that our economic future is complicated, as families readjust on spending, industries readjust on production, unemployment rises and housing prices continue to fall. As our government sinks deeper into record debt, any waste or reckless public spending by political leaders would be unconscionable.

We live in the D.C. area, and I must point out that Andrews’s home and lifestyle were certainly not among the most excessive. Mistakes were made, and Andrews was brave and generous to outline his experiences for readers.

I had frankly struggled over the past many months to appreciate the scale of the subprime mess and the many delinquencies that have occurred. The aggregated defaults — with numbers in the billions of dollars — lost all sense of perspective and understanding for me. But Edmund L. Andrews and his family’s story really humanized the issue better than all the bank failures could.

I suggest The New York Times give him a big bonus so he can square up with Chase, get on with life and refocus his energies on being the wonderful reporter that he obviously is.

Edmund L. Andrews is to be congratulated on the unusual degree of candor he displays. I suppose that if the article itself generates enough interest in the book from which it is said to be adapted, it is we readers who will write the final chapter in this tale of financial woe. By buying copies of the book, we can ourselves perhaps free the author and his wife just before the train arrives. It is an odd feeling. But sign me up!

Oh GAG. This was an educated man who understood the subprime mortgage crisis. This wasn't someone buffaloed by a smooth-talking broker. "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." And knowing all this, he and his new wife went ahead and spent money like a drunken sailor.

Or as Hubby said to me: "One thing that's interesting to me is that he makes pretty much the same salary that I make, so it's easy to compare what they're doing to what we're doing. Basically, imagine that you didn't have a job and that I had to pay $4,000 a month in alimony, and instead of living in a house that cost $240k, 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... "

Of course not. And probably neither would any of you.