Thanks! I've mostly followed this, but, being too lazy to write out each sub call, put them all in a foreach loop:

sub load_defaults_for_model {
    my ($self) = @_;
    my $model = $self->defaults();
    if ( defined( $model )) {
        foreach my $attrib (keys %{ $model }) {
            $self->$attrib( $model->{$attrib} );
        }
    }
}
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The $self->defaults() method currently just pulls a hash from a master hash, but I'll make it use a database when I get that far :-)