Reporter's Notebook

-Megan Patrick-Vaughn can be reached at mpatrick@vbjusa.com

THANKS, MOM

I’m just going to say it: My mom was right.
The woman is good with money, and she taught me from a very young age that living on debt isn’t smart.

It took me a long time to listen – What did my mom know? She’s was only my mother – but debt is hard to comprehend when you’re living in the security of your parents’ house and your biggest financial challenge is figuring out how many kids to babysit to buy the latest New Kids on the Block tape.

Despite my mom’s warnings, once I was a grown up living on my own, it was just so easy to use my shiny, fabulous new credit cards to live the life I knew I deserved to be living.

“I’ll just pay it off next month,” I would tell myself. Well let me tell you, it took five years and a lot of discipline to pay off those credit cards. But once I did, the freedom it allowed was a little overwhelming.

I think we are learning this lesson as a country right now. United States consumers have been on the high of having relatively unrestricted access to money in the last few years, and now we’re paying the price in a major way.

Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin writes that individual frugality has made a cultural comeback, as the “Year of the Bottomless Bailout” has yielded a much-needed correction in the lives of ordinary Americans.

Some folks are delaying large purchases, vacations, eating out less. Hopefully we’re all saving more.

“Out of necessity, a consumption-based society is learning to live within its means,” Malkin wrote in a recent column.

This is not an easy or fun lesson to learn. But in order to get back on the right track, it’s one that’s got to be taken to heart.