How can assets and loans ruin our personal lives?

We believe in an economic system that distinguishes people based on the asset they possess. It seems quite logical and we often rely greatly on them for providing us a sense of financial security and elevated societal status. But sometimes, we are strangled by it.

Our perpetual desire to flaunt our assets and leveraging them to accumulate more wealth results in squeezing out our lives. We get dazzled by the glitter and temporarily forget that our life is what we earn for.

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Throughout the course of history, it has been observed that people live and die for wealth. From the days of depending on livestock to the age of Big Data, one thing is constant – people’s effort to amass wealth and create assets. Before getting deeper, it is important to bear in mind that by asset we shall think and discuss only about materialistic assets and not the ones borne out of philosophers’ minds. Now for the purpose of elucidation, let us consider an example.

We get higher education after availing bank loans, which they offer in exchange of keeping an asset of the borrower as a security or mortgage to be revoked later if the borrower fails to repay the loan. Then we work 90 hours a week to repay those loans and take new loans for creating tangible assets like cars and homes. Besides, we raise our children and keep our spouses happy by buying them things that they do not need but they still yearn for it. We even resort to cheating our kin and initiate lawsuits when we feel that are assets are slipping from our grip. The vicious cycle goes on from exploiting assets of our parents to let our next generation exploit ours.

Mean and dirty it may sound, but assets are crucial components of our belief system. Our economy is based on the hypothesis that it is important to build, maintain, secure and use assets at the most critical hours of our lives. However, in this endless pursuit of assets, we often tend to forget that we sacrifice other beautiful moments of our lives. A man misses the birth of his first child, because he remains busy at some important meeting with clients. Sealing the deal is more important to him rather than attending his child’s birth, as he cannot risk his job and put his capability to pay EMIs into jeopardy. Such is today’s thought process that retaining a Mercedes Benz is more important than witnessing the birth cry.

On the other hand, banks and other non-banking financial institutions cannot be blamed for designing these devious schemes of attracting customers and ensuring that the loans are repaid. After all, they are here to do business by lending money to those who need it. They simply monetize the craving of human beings to get more, while people pledge their existing assets to get loans and possess new things. Sometimes, salaried persons having steady jobs are offered loans for buying apartments or cars. In such cases, the object that is bought is hypothecated to the bank, which means that banks can take possession and initiate legal actions against the borrower if the monthly installments are not paid.

Now imagine the plight of the salaried employee who misses out his child’s birth for attending a meeting, which is crucial for his job. There is no guarantee that he will not be fired by his employer if he asks for a leave to take his newborn baby to a doctor for routine checkup, instead of prioritizing another random meeting before his personal agenda. If he is fired, he fails to repay the mandatory EMIs and asset recovery service providers hired by banks pounces on his Mercedes Benz within days of missing the deadline. The man loses his asset and misses the ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity of staying by his wife at the time of his baby’s birth. Who is to be blamed for such situations the bank or the borrower? The borrower off course; for it was his false sense of status that compelled him to buy a car which he cannot afford by shelling out his savings.

Another genre of asset recovery service providers has cropped up in recent times, which focuses on IT asset recovery. If you are thinking that, this latest addition in the list of service is related to the confiscation of computers and laptops bought on loan, you are wrong. There is no room for such confusion, as these professionals are here only to recover lost data and redundant hardware from us, if only if appoint them to do so.