As part of a series of articles on debt, the New York Times recently published an article with an interesting title: Given a Shovel, Americans Dig Deeper Into Debt.  This is proof that time travel is easy: you only have to change a few words to travel back two years ago, when obesity was the hot topic of human failings and “Given a Hamburger, Americans Eat Themselves Into Obesity” would have been an NYT headline.

I say debt is the new fat precisely because it seems to be following the same public opinion trend: first it was the fault of obese people, then the society that made them obese, then the food industry that made billions off their obesity. I fear a similar trend in thinking about debt. First people with debt were uneducated and foolish for getting into the situation in the first place, then it was the fault of a consumer society that taught them to spend and spend and spend and never save, and now banks and credit card companies are taking the brunt of debt critique.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t think all three are partially true, or that banks aren’t predatory.  They’ve hired marketers and had strategy sessions, departing from a model of making money in partnership with the people they lend to and jumped entirely on the bandwagon of getting people into debt and keeping them there.  But there has to be an element of personal responsibility: one way or another, until we can force banks to change (and I applaud those who are trying), the only meaningful change we can make starts with the individual.

But that isn’t so easy.  Similar to the struggle that policy makers and scientists are dealing with in trying to tackle America’s obesity problem, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact balance at which you want people to feel bad about being in debt. Make them feel too bad and they’ll feel so guilty and hopeless that they won’t step up and take control of their finances. But laying the blame completely on another doorstep, be it fast food or big banks, allows people to abdicate responsibility entirely – without acknowledging that part of the problem is theirs, people cannot take responsibility for being part of the solution.

We’ve been talking around this mindset at Thrive this week. On the environmental side, we’re glad that we can point people in the direction of low interest credit cards and high interest savings accounts, financial vehicles that reward people for healthy finance. We can’t stop banks from advertising a “having debt is better than not having stuff” message anymore than we can stop fast food restaurants from pumping their meals full of salt, but we can at least make sure people are using banks that help them dig out of debt, not into it.

But how do you talk to people about their side of the debt equation, without making them feel hopeless and guilty? People know they should spend less, and most people feel bad that they don’t. Simply identifying that people are overspending isn’t enough, anymore than pointing out that a fat person needs to eat less is going to help them lose weight (indeed, we’ve actually taken a few lessons from the study of obesity; see my recent post Gaining Weight…In Your Wallet).

It is something we want to do more of, and if you have suggestions, feel free to leave comments; I’ll be checking back to see what ideas you all have for helping people to take ownership of their spending behaviors. On the docket for us: more extensive use of behavioral budgeting, messaging that links to the real world behaviors we know you have, and more extensive use of recommendations to help curb spending and promote saving.