Your Just Deserts (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

I love Michelle Singletary, the personal finance columnist in the Washington Post. She’s the bane of rationalizers everywhere. Last month, she laid down the law on vacation expenses in a column provocatively headlined, “If you’re in debt, you don’t deserve a vacation.”

“Nothing makes me crazier,” she wrote, “than when people deep in debt try to persuade me that they are being financially responsible because they ‘saved up’ for their vacation.

“And I am not impressed that you saved for a summer trip to Walt Disney World with your children when you haven’t even set up a college fund for them.

“Neither will I give you a high-five for paying cash for a cruise when you have continued to carry a credit card balance for years. Go have a picnic at a community lake.”

Singletary is not opposed to travel. Nor is she opposed to time off. (“I’m not saying you shouldn’t enjoy your vacation time,” she wrote. “Take your time off. Relax. But you don’t have to go away.”) She’s just opposed to people rationalizing vacations as higher priorities than paying down debt or saving for future inevitabilities.

The feedback — some 1,700 comments on the Post’s website and more on Twitter — was predictable: “judgmental,” “sanctimonious,” “hostile,” “Calvinist prig,” “classist and repugnant.” And those were the folks who didn’t resort to profanity.

The most common objection to Singletary’s column was the use of the word deserve — especially when preceded by don’t. But that’s the word that gets to the heart of the matter. Deserve is not an economic concept; it’s a marketing concept. It’s a word that allows consumers to rationalize spending money on appealing nonessentials. This is not a reckless self-indulgence; it’s the lifestyle you deserve as much as anyone — and woe be to anyone who suggests otherwise.

Singletary didn’t back down an inch. Life isn’t fair. Some people, either through hard work or luck, have plenty of money and can travel without going into debt or short-changing other priorities. But home economics is just like all economics: the conflict between limited resources and unlimited wants and needs. And while travel is glorious, it is an expensive luxury — and only more so when compounded by credit card interest rates.

Singletary’s audience was so outraged by her suggestion that paying off debt and saving for college should be a higher priority than fabulous vacations that only about 650 commented on her other target on the same day: destination weddings.

“You do know that your invitation isn’t a subpoena, right?” she wrote.

Curiously, the comments were far more favorable. Oh, there were a few bridezillas, like one who commented, “Weddings are not about the guests. While it is courteous for the [bride and groom] to consider making it affordable for their guests, it is not mandatory.”

It seems people think they deserve an expensive trip of their choice, whether they can comfortably afford it or not, but they agree that an expensive trip to a destination of someone else’s choice is not worth the cost.

Chase Bank riled up the twittersphere last week with a tweet that suggested low account balances were associated with frivolous spending: “make coffee at home,” “eat the food that’s already in the fridge,” “you don’t need a cab, it’s only three blocks.”

It’s good advice, of course, but tone-deaf. People didn’t seem to appreciate getting it from the bank whose lavishly compensated CEO was caught flat-footed in testimony before Congress just weeks earlier when asked about inadequate pay for his employees.

I was a kid when McDonald’s introduced one of the great marketing slogans of all time: You Deserve a Break Today, complete with a jingle that lent itself to folk, pop or R&B. Back then, Americans still ate most of their meals at home, so McDonald’s told women that they deserved a break from cooking every once in a while. A print ad from 1971 shows Dad bringing a McDonald’s dinner home to Mom and three little kids waiting at a table set with tablecloth, stoneware and flatware. “She deserves a break today,” according to the caption.

Check YouTube for other breaks consumers of the ‘70s deserved — a break from cleaning the kitchen, a break from hard outdoor play, a break from driving cross-country with a couple of adorable kids rolling around loose in the backseat. Michelle Singletary would approve the jingle lyrics for that last one: “The vacation’s on a shoestring, but we’re doing all we can …”

Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.