Yesterday Democracy Now had a pair of interesting segments about the crisis in the mortgage lending sector. Subprime Lending Crisis: Millions of Families Face Losing Their Homes to Foreclosure and In Debt We Trust: America Before the Bubble Burst ... the idea they present is that 'predatory lenders' have been roaming the country stealing peoples houses and forcing people to run up enormous debts.

In the personal finance section of this web site I go over a model for living that some call Living Beneath Your Means. It isn't a new model for living, and in previous generations they might have called it making do. The general LBYM idea is, no matter what your income is, you can live such that your costs are less than your income, and you then set aside (invest) the remainder. The more money you can invest from the remainder, the more freedom your future has.