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  Here’s one gift that I received from the recession: A profound fear of excessive debt. Before the financial crisis hit in 2008, I cared more about molding my life into what I thought it should be than about building a secure foundation for the future.     I thought nothing of paying for grocery bills with my credit card so that I could “afford” the rent in a tiny shared apartment in New York, and I came dangerously close to signing up for $60k in student loans so that I could hang a fancy graduate degree on my threadbare wall.   It wasn’t until I was seriously shaken by the Great Recession that I began to reassess my rocky relationship with debt. Nothing is worth a lifetime of restricted choices and unremitting financial fear. But the psychology that leads a person to accumulate excessive debt so that they can live a life more closely aligned with what they imagined is easy to understand.    A new study that is set to appear in the Journal of Consumer Research in December came to a similar conclusion. The study profiled 27 white, middle-class Americans in 2006 and uncovered a familiar communal attitude toward debt: Building a more comfortable life underwritten by credit is “the American way,” as one research participant put it.     “The economic crash was not just about people being dumb or greedy,” said Michelle Barnhart, one of study’s lead researchers, in a statement. “There are compelling forces out there that lead people to live lifestyles outside of their means.”   According to Barnhart, credit card use and heavy debt became such a normal part of American culture in recent decades that Americans began to view it as an essential building block for creating the life they thought they needed – or deserved. “Even though we say as a society, ‘don’t get in debt,’ the overwhelming messages being sent out – from the way credit is used to approve or disapprove us for services to political leaders telling us to spend after a big disaster to prove our patriotism – all of this has created a culture of debt,” said Barnhart.      Among the study’s other, equally compelling findings:

• Younger participants said that they were uneasy about applying for credit, but they felt that it was a necessary evil to finance the things they needed for the future.
• Some participants talked about measuring their personal worth by the loans they were approved for. Being denied funding for, say, a larger home or other big expense seriously wounded their self esteem.
• Half the participants in the study were in significant debt and one-third were being actively pursued by collection agencies.
• All 27 said that they learned the basics of financial literacy mostly through personal experience. Only a select few had learned about how to manage their finances in school or at home.

The study’s greatest limitation — besides being small — is that the interviews were conducted before 2008. Barnhart says that she would like to do a follow-up report on Americans’ attitude toward debt after the recession. That’s the study that I would like to see.

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