One of my friends (ish ... more like acquaintance) is having his house repossessed due to mortgage default, and he is probably going to declare himself bankrupt to escape huge debts. I feel deeply sorry for his kids, but not for him or his wife. Why? Well, a few years ago (not many) his aged, childless, spinster aunt died in a nursing home and in her will she left everything to her sister's children. He is an only child, so he got the lot. The lot turned out to be a lot! £200,000, to be precise. I know because he bragged endlessly about it to anyone who would listen. Now, I've seen their house and it's nothing palatial, just a normal terraced three-bed place. They were mortgaged up to the eyeballs and you would think they'd bang the whole lot into the mortgage and other debts, all 200 fat ones, pay off the mortgage and have enough left for a slap-up meal, a family trip to the cinema and the joy of being a mortgage-free and debt-free couple in their early thirties, with a nice enough house to show for it. You would think they'd do that. Any sane, rational person would do that ... Instead, they ripped out a five-year-old decent kitchen and had an absolutely top-of-the-range marble masterpiece fitted. Then they did the same to the perfectly functional modern bathroom. Then they bought their daughter a horse. A f**king horse. And bed 'n' board and a stables. The list of outrageous purchases goes on. Long story short, they burned the whole wadge of filthy lucre in three years flat. Yep, two hundred big 'uns, all spent in three years, and they used absolutely none of it to pay off any of their seemingly prodigious debts. I really feel sorry for their kids, that's all I can say.