My parents grew up in the 1930's - my father would hoe corn on a hillside for a nickel, pushing his clothing in the cracks of their small home to keep out the winter--and my mother was fortunate enough to have parents that owned a small grocery store. My father's grandmother owned a small store as well, and helped his parents keep food on the table by giving the kids odd jobs while my grandfather was away working on the railroad.

I still remember the inside of my grandparent's home and garage - they saved EVERYTHING. One wall was full of empty Clorox bottles, and they made quilts and used old rags instead of bandages on wounds.

I was raised not knowing the taste of brown beans or other simple fare, because my father grew up on these staples and never wanted to see or eat them again.

I have watched myself and others around me get overextended in their credit, folks with good jobs but with bad habits as far as spending is concerned. It has been frustrating to watch them get new cars every couple years or buy houses that were so fancy I was afraid to sit down in them.

As with all things, this extravagance could not last. I see people blaming the government, the banks, blaming this or that but honestly we are all to blame.

How many of us use credit cards to fill-in when we don't have enough money, but fail to pay the balance off every month? How many of us decide we want a new car when the one we have is still working fine and not paid off yet? Go upside-down? No problem! I'll get insurance to cover it and if I'm worried about the payments I'll wreck it and that extra money will be covered...

I've seen people with fancy houses who didn't even have money to put furniture in them! So they go the local rent-to-own cause their credit is maxed out and pay 2x as much cause they want the fancy stuff now.

We ALL do it! I am guilty as anyone cause I have balances on my credit cards that will take months to pay off.

I knew better. We ALL knew better. I was raised by parents who taught me better, who drilled in my head that if you didn't have the cash for it right then, you needed to do without it. That if you were tight on money, you did without extras like phone service (a luxury when I was a kid) and cable. Satellite radio, cellphones, and Internet were unheard-of when I was a kid.

I remembered my father's words, and have managed not to be too bad off as a result. My van was a fixer-upper, with repairs to get it running costing about 2K less than the same van off the lot, which meant I was able to pay cash instead of finance. I financed one car in my life, when I was young and dumb and lost it when I got pregnant and couldn't make the payments. I promised myself that would never happen again and so far it hasn't.

We don't have luxuries like cable. I need high-speed internet for my job, so we use that to watch shows online, otherwise it is DVD's or radio only in this house. If my kids don't like it I tell them to go read a book.

They don't have the fancy game machines. We have multi-purpose computers, mostly built from discarded parts, running linux cause it's free.

My clothes are all hand-me downs from my more spendthrifty friends. My daughter's clothes are a combination of hand-me-downs, thrift store finds, and clearance rack discoveries.

But I STILL messed up by taking the advice of friends to use credit cards for day-to-day expenses instead of cash. As a result I have balances to pay off.

It is MY FAULT. No one else's. No one made me spend more than I had. No one threatened me. I DID IT.

And there are others out there in a similar boat OF THEIR OWN MAKING. What are a lot of them doing? Filing bankruptcy, creating a clean slate for themselves. And who pays for that? The Banks.

It isn't all about the people who unexpectedly got in over their heads because of balloon payments or predatory lenders. That is tragic and that is wrong.

The majority of it is caused by people like myself who have gotten themselves in over our heads and instead of owning up to our mistakes we look for the easy way out. And that easy way out is destroying the banks of America.

My credit cards are all locked away out of reach. It is hard, but I am making my payments on them plus buying only what I can afford on cash instead of looking at what I want and putting it on credit. I will pay off every penny on those cards, period.

If more people would simply own up to their mistakes and pay off the debts they have accumulated, the economy would NOT be in the situation it is in today.

So stop blaming Bush or Obama or McCain or the guy down the road, and look in the mirror. We are ALL to blame.

And the ones who will suffer for it? Not us, we did this and will get what we deserve. It will be our kids. They will be paying for our mistakes for years to come.