Economic schadenfreude: Before you open that bleak credit card statement, before you check that dwindling balance in your checking account, you find yourself browsing stories about families who had to foreclose on their homes, people looking for work, marriages torn apart by debt. These stories are a strange mix of soothing and depressing, like making yourself feel better about your asthma by reading testimonials by terminal cancer patients.

But the best hard-luck stories are the ones you can savor without feeling guilty about it, stories about people who were clearly foolish with their money. Ideally, these tragic characters had big piles of cash at some point, but refused to get a real job or continued to live in an enormous house despite the fact that they were sinking into more debt every day.

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