The Boateng's even state in the article that in their culture, you buy what you can afford to pay cash for and keep it a long time. So they at least had some basic understanding of "buy what you can afford". They, for whatever reasons, decided to ignore the good financial advice they'd grown up with.
Lots of 'this is America' stuff. They don't get loans in their native country because they can't. They get to the USA, start getting contact points and advice from their church, and remember that a lot of this stuff is things that Americans fell for as well. They got sold the 'American dream' hard, it wouldn't have been ideal, but they 'probably' would have been fine if it hadn't been for the crash.
I'll admit that I saw the crash coming, but a lot of economists didn't even see it, and what ones did were ignored*.
They deserved to be forced to declare bankruptcy and move back into the townhouse, but beyond that? Not much.
Oh, and I wonder if they're the type where digital currency isn't really real to them.
*I knew it was going to happen sometime, but as a non-economist I wasn't even going to try to predict when. But the economists weren't good at guessing either.
