By Charlotte Kemp

I’m not too sure I was taken seriously when in the middle of a Humorous Approach to Debt Collecting course, I affirmed the ladies who had to track down young students who had defaulted on their varsity loans and sometimes issue judgments against them. We want to protect our children and we try not to do things that will cause embarrassment or shame. After all, that is the ethos behind the whole Humorous Approach. So why would I encourage them to take legal action against young people and issue judgments that would prevent them from being able to buy their first cars or come up on credit reports when they wanted to rent their first homes?

Well who do we learn our behaviors and beliefs from? We are molded primarily by parents and schools and then obviously culture. Here are young people who are leaving university who probably were sent by parents, and clearly have sufficient intelligence and education to get into and through varsity, and yet they haven’t learnt one basic life lesson – pay what you owe! Their parents haven’t taught them. And school and varsity seems to have failed too. And now we are in a recession with built in excuses for not paying up.

If someone doesn’t stop a kid in his tracks right now, then imagine him in twenty years time – married, with children in school, credit cards maxed out and one bond payment away from losing his home. A crisis, a hiccup even, is going to bring that family down just as we are seeing so many suffering today.

It is up to these women, whose job it is to find students attempting to avoid their debt and their responsibility, to give them an education far more valuable than the degree they may or may not have earned in the lecture hall. When you make a commitment, when you sign a contract, you have to take responsibility for the consequences. Suck it up. Be a man, or a woman, and grow up and take responsibility instead of trying to blame it or lay it on someone else.

I know what I am talking about because I am paying – literally paying money – for my mistakes. Have a look at my 50 Lessons learned on the way to business failure blog to see why. It is not pleasant but it is time we started trying to live with some integrity instead of trying to find ways to avoid responsibility.

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