I'll add -- when I bought my first house, the ancient furnace died just a few months later. In March. It was soooo close to the time of year when you could do without one and spend the summer figuring out what to do, but not quite. The baby had just turned 1. The company we hired to install a new one -- which advertised itself as being a Christian business -- charged us 25 percent interest. (This was in 1991. Interest rates were nuts. Our mortgage was 9.5 percent and wasn't even considered high.) I did everything I could to pay that off as soon as. possible, but it took a while because we had nothing. But ... what were we going to do? Not get a furnace? If we hadn't had a baby, we probably would have toughed it out by wearing our coats in the house for a month. You can't do that with a baby in the house.

"Christian" business my ass. Businesses don't have religions.