Author: Financial institutions have morphed from ‘credit providers’ to ‘credit pushers'

[Newsjock]

Source: Vancouver Sun

Some 22 years after writing The Wealthy Barber, which became easily the bestselling personal finance book in Canadian history, David Chilton has a dire warning in The Wealthy Barber Returns, to be released this fall.

“The worst thing that’s happening to Canadians in the last 20 years has been lines of credit,” said Chilton, speaking at a recent Canadian Pension and Benefits Institute conference in Vancouver. “If I was prime minister, I’d shut them down. It’s unbelievable how people are abusing these things.”

... “Our financial institutions, when I was young, were credit providers. Now they’re credit pushers, and they are very aggressively hoisting as much debt onto the Canadian public as they possibly can. The public is taking it in, and it is not a good situation.”

... “One thing we’re seeing that we never saw 20 years ago is that all sorts of people who built up their RRSP (retirement savings) through ‘pay yourself first,’ have simultaneously built up their credit line through the back end and their net worth has changed modestly if at all,” Chilton said.

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Financial+institutions+have+morphed+from+credit+providers+credit+pushers/4884347/story.html