The Great Australian Art of Borrowing Money for Things You Shouldn't

A mate of mine got asked recently if she could lend ten grand for a holiday. Not “can I borrow the car” money. Ten thousand dollars, for cocktails on a beach somewhere. She said no, obviously, but it stuck with her enough that she brought it up at dinner, and it’s stuck with me enough that I’m writing about it now.

I went looking for other people’s versions of this story, expecting a few good ones. What I found was a small museum of financial self-sabotage. A man who borrowed money for food and spent it on a haircut instead, then went hungry for two days on principle, apparently. A bloke who wanted a few thousand dollars for his seven-year-old’s birthday party, gift bags at the door and everything. Someone who redrew equity from their house, twenty grand, to fly the family and the dog to Perth for a few weeks. There’s a rhythm to these stories once you’ve read enough of them: someone borrows money they don’t have for something they don’t need, and everyone around them can see the crash coming except the person driving.

The wedding stories were the ones that really got me. Person after person describing partners and friends going into debt, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, for a single day. One bloke sold a house his aunt had gifted him to pay for a wedding, then gambled away most of what was left, and ended up living with his in-laws for fifteen years to claw back a deposit on the next place. That’s not a wedding. That’s a decade-long hangover with a photographer.

And yet. Plenty of people in that same thread pushed back, and fairly. Weddings mean different things to different families. In a lot of cultures it’s not really about the couple at all, it’s about the parents, the elders, showing respect through scale. One bloke wrote about marrying his partner decades into their relationship, in their backyard, a hundred and twenty people, and called it one of the best days of his life without a flicker of regret. I believe him. The problem was never the wedding. The problem is borrowing money you don’t have to pay for it, and pretending the debt is part of the celebration.

I think about this stuff more than is probably healthy, partly because of the industry I’m in. Spend enough time around IT and DevOps and you start to see debt everywhere, not just the financial kind. Technical debt, the shortcuts you take today because the deadline’s screaming, that someone pays for eighteen months down the track with interest. It’s the same shape. Somebody always ends up holding the invoice for a decision that felt fine in the moment.

The one thing that actually shifted my thinking, reading through all these stories, was a comment near the end. Someone said never lend money expecting it back; if you’re not prepared to think of it as a gift, don’t lend it at all. That’s clean advice, and it cuts through a lot of the awkwardness that usually surrounds these conversations. I’ve lent money to exactly two people in my life. One paid it back within the month. The other still owes me, and I’ve made peace with never seeing it again, because the alternative was watching a mate lose his flat over six weeks without work in an industry that runs hot and cold with the seasons. That felt like the right call. Ten grand for a holiday never would have.

There’s no tidy lesson here, and I’m not going to pretend there is. Some debt is compassion with a price tag, rent when someone’s between jobs, a flight home when a parent dies unexpectedly. Some debt is just impatience dressed up as an emergency, a holiday you couldn’t quite afford turned into someone else’s problem. The difference usually isn’t hard to spot from the outside. It’s spotting it in your own life, when you’re the one asking, that seems to be where everybody’s radar goes quiet.