THE COLOR OF MONEY
Readers heap scorn on man who won't charge to feed friend's growling tummy

By Michelle Singletary

If my mail is any indication, I certainly stirred up a lot of reaction in a recent column on financial integrity.

I wrote that a friend refused to use his credit card to get me something to eat after I had mistakenly left my wallet at home. Despite my pleas of hunger, my friend stood fast by his rule not to use his card unless it was an emergency. I wrote how I concluded later that I was wrong to try to persuade him to charge for food. I said he had displayed financial integrity by not breaking his money rule.

Well, the deluge of reader responses flabbergasted me.

"I was horrified by the tale of your inflexible friend's refusal to use his credit card when it was needed," one Virginia woman wrote. "I suspect that buying lunch would have cost less than $20, and since you would have repaid him immediately, his strict attitude did not seem like conduct that is desirable in one's friends. Your friend's 'financial integrity' is a disguise for his cheapness."

One man said: "It's all well and good to have financial discipline (I do), but one needs to be flexible and not regard an emergency only as virtually ... life-or-death."

A reader from Santa Rosa, Calif., said: "What kind of 'friend' is this who has earned so much of your respect for acting like such a selfish jerk? Finding yourselves so short of cash WAS an emergency — I mean, it's not like you were trying to get an alcoholic friend to have a drink with you! ... After reading your column, I hate him!"

Other readers chided my friend for not taking advantage of the many perks of using credit cards.

"For many years I have used credit cards to pay for EVERYTHING, e.g., college tuition, dental bills, groceries, restaurants, gas, even small purchases around $15," one reader wrote. "I pay the entire bill each month and never have an interest fee. This has allowed us one free airfare to Europe and several free flights within the United States. There are many things like alcohol, carbohydrates and credit cards that can be a good thing if used in a constructive way."

While I certainly appreciate the disagreement about the use of debt, many of the people demonizing my friend are wrong, said financial planner Ric Edelman, who first wrote to me to say he agreed with what I had written. I then asked Edelman to respond to the criticism about my friend.

"Sure, one can argue that he could have had pity on a friend in plight — but I bet he knows you, too, and he knew you weren't REALLY in plight," Edelman said. "If you were, I bet he would have rescued you. But there's a big difference between being stuck at 2 a.m. with a flat tire out of town and being hungry from a missed meal. One's a need, the other a want — and he carefully parsed the two. And he stood up to the SNIOP in the process. Bravo for him and bravo for you for recognizing this. Poo on the folks who just don't get it."

You may wonder what Edelman meant by SNIOP. It's an acronym — "Susceptible to the Negative Influences of Other People" — that he coined in his best-selling book "The Truth About Money."