Topic: Misc.
Are you gambling responsibly?
By Dominic Bourke
There is a dealer at the Gutshot cardroom in London who is affectionately known as Polish Mike. When sitting down to deal, he invariably greets the punters with the words ‘Please remember to gamble responsibly'. This is inevitably met with much laughter, followed by people betting bottom pair as if they held the holy grail itself. While Mike is a very likeable guy, he has one major flaw, and that is that he is massively underemployed. He should in fact be Governor of the Bank Of England. If the BOE aren’t going to employ him in their top job (he couldn’t do worse than Mervyn King, the present incumbent) then they should at least put him on the payroll. They could buy him a huge megaphone and station him outside large banks and major lending centres and as people entered these buildings he could shout at them ‘Please remember to gamble responsibly!’ Hopefully these punters would be more receptive than most poker players.
Why do I think Polish Mike should be in charge of British Monetary policy? Because the largest threat to the British economy is people gambling, sorry investing with almost psychotic irresponsibility. No one personifies this problem more succinctly than Sayara Beg. Fortunately the BBC have given this lady her own blog, so I don’t need to go into too much depth explaining her situation, you can read it for yourself:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4997170.stm
To give you a brief précis:
Her husband’s business was struggling, so they remortgaged their house and took out a personal loan. They also have two buy-to-let properties mortgaged up to the hilt, as well as credit card debts. Having decided that they were earning way too much money to service their meagre debts (which as a figure in the air guess, I would estimate are at least £500k) they decided to have a baby. Unfortunately shortly after she got pregnant, she was released from her job.
And guess what? One income, especially an uncertain one such as owning a restaurant, was not sufficient to service their mountain of debt. She is now using a news organization funded by you and I, to whinge and whine about how unfair it all is.
What galls me most about this woman isn’t the fact that she has taken a punt and that it has gone wrong. God knows any poker player/gambler could empathise with that. We have all punted a racing certainty and watched it get beat and many people, myself included, are nailed on to do it again (if Vorteeva runs at Tipperary on Thursday, my mortgage will be firmly on the line.) No, the real problem with this woman, and by extension with the British economy is that she refuses to take any responsibility for her situation. None of it is her fault; she feels she should take exactly 0% of the blame. So you have no guaranteed income in your family (he owns a restaurant, she is a freelancer) you rack up what must be a minimum of half a million pounds worth of debt, then you decide to have a baby. Yet when you can’t service your debt it isn’t your fault???
She points out in her first entry that she is different from most people who go broke, because she didn’t spend money she didn’t have on a shopping spree. Actually that is exactly what she did, only rather than buy Dolce and Gabbana dresses or Rolex watches, she bought buy-to lets, I guess the main difference is that if you have a cash flow problem you can flog a Rolex on Ebay way quicker than you can sell a studio flat in Bermondsey.
Further evidence of her sanctimoniousness comes when she reveals that by contacting her banks with a plan of action, she genuinely believes she has fulfilled all her responsibilities to them. The fact that she offers them the worst financial deal in the world by resolving to take a 6-month payment holiday, during which she will pay no interest nor pay any charges and after which they will simply continue as normal as though nothing has happened, doesn’t seem to be reason enough to her for them turning it down. If anyone doesn’t realise why this is such an awful deal for any bank to agree to, I will quite happily take £10k off their hands, pay no interest or charges on it, and then give them the £10k back in 6 months time. She takes her creditors refusal to countenance such an offer as proof that they simply have no desire to allow her to have her baby in peace, rather than what it actually is, namely commercial companies taking decisions that reflect their desire to act as ‘For Profit’ organisations rather than charities.
I don’t want to appear heartless here. I am after all a human being. I think it is nothing short of tragic that someone who is heavily pregnant has got herself into this situation. I really do hope that nothing that is happening at the moment affects the child and the baby is delivered healthy and happy. But the truth is that this lady’s attitude affects all of us. There are so many people who feel that they have a right to borrow unlimited amounts of money, and that any investment they make with that money has a divine right to be risk free. There are so many people out there who delude themselves into thinking they are ‘Asset rich, but cash poor’ when in fact their debts are worth more than their assets, which in layman’s terms means they are skint.
The problem is that when enough of these people find their house of cards collapsing around them, it will give not just them, but also the entire British economy a hell of a problem. It is no surprise therefore that the banks have now decided to take action, for example in the last year HBOS have lowered the limits of 600,000 credit card customers. It seems that if the British public are not going to listen to Polish Mike and gamble responsibly, then the financial institutions have decided that they aren’t going to allow the bets to be placed with their money.
