My experience with debt is that I've generally avoided it my whole life. I've paid my credit card off right away for many years and even my college loans, I ended up paying off when I crashed my car in my early 20's (the insurance settlement was exactly how much I needed to pay it off). I also lived on cheap pasta (down to $0.37 a meal) for a few months to do it. That said, there was this mortgage thing that I had to start dealing with as soon as I got married.

I had to think a lot about the morality of money while working on "Thank God for Bitcoin." I went into it thinking that it's just a normal part of life and that mortgages and credit cards were an everyday fact of life.

The more I studied money from a moral perspective, the more I realized that debt, especially debt that was created from nothing like mortgages and credit card debt, is an unmitigated evil. Each time we take out a mortgage or use a credit card, we're expanding the money supply because that's not money coming from someone's savings. Hence all such debt is stealing from everyone else holding that currency, in my case the US dollar. Those are some of the poorest and most vulnerable in the world, the people living in hyperinflation like in Venezuela, Lebanon, North Korea. Those are the people I'm stealing from.

I think Biblical writers had it right. Debtor is servant to the lender. That's how I view debt now, even the debt that's from someone's savings.