171–180 of 568 posts
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Robin Hood, robbing the rich to give to the [morally validated].
There's a huuuuge difference from being poor serfs in the feudal lord's fiefdom than someone that can't say no to a sale but can't actually afford it and buys on credit.
Their office was located in a low tier residential appartment. Debtors had to interact and pay through an improvised hatch DIY'd into the appartment's front door.
> I have had substantially more at-bats with debt collectors than most people, as a result of an old hobby of writing letters on behalf of debtors to their lenders and non-affiliated debt collectors. What kind of "old hobby" is this? My hobbies are.. well, ok, I do help my family with their various enterprises in my free time. To be fair, it took writing this comment to make the mental leap :D
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Amazing: https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.guidebook.com/upload/z5nhuRkp...
“Who knew about YouTube?” In 2016…
Creating Your Own YouTube Video
• Any Video Will Do
• PowerPoint Put to Music
• Picture of Your Building
• Hire a Professional
When one uses credit to an extreme and it suddenly changes under you, the conversation becomes interesting. The issue is - one negative thing like a 30 day lack of payment - tanks a score based on things you mostly can't control aside from paying bills.
I had this happen recently because in the US mortgages get sold repeatedly and on one propery I have it was sold 3x in a year and somehow I missed one thing. Shouldn't have, but multiple addresses, shifting mortgages, etc. The funny thing, once the "deliquenct" account agency wasn't involved, the score ticked back up.
In the US - credit is a game, it's based on how much you make (or how much you claim you can make), making payments, an keeping a score high. If you hit a high threshhold and suddenly sink after years of relationships...those old relationships can help with debt and collection.
At a certain point, institutions you have dealt with want to maintain healthy relationships.
I've have great credit situations with Amex and Citi going back decades and leveraged those to offset/erase turmoil issues.
What's the waste of the software industry?
It has several flavors, but there are some common themes and causes. Developers simply like writing code more than they like writing documentation, and they like writing documentation more than they like maintaining old codebases. Meanwhile, software vendors of all kinds have universally decided that they shouldn't be spending any money on any form of technical support that comes with a heartbeat.
Down in the home and small-business markets, there are a lot of people that get absolutely screwed by this. New software comes out, something tries to auto-update (or the user is forced to update), something goes sideways, and ... that's it. Stuck. Nobody to call. Some really sharp Google skills once upon a time could sometimes find an answer, but even that's thoroughly rotted out now.
So if your small business has your entire customer database in an old version of Quickbooks running on the office PC with Windows 7 configured by the last tech to stop complaining about updates, and then one day Quickbooks refuses to launch and displays instead an obtuse error message ... what do you do? For a while, you could call me, and for several years, I mostly enjoyed building a business out of fixing these sorts of things (and helping people navigate the sometimes very tricky update process so that this wouldn't be a recurring problem).
Unfortunately, software kept getting worse, documentation kept getting harder to come by, Google kept getting worse, everything kept getting converted into subscription SaaS (which meant that most of my answers started becoming, "yeah, that's just how it works now, I can't do anything about it, yeah, it sucks, yeah, lots of other people are complaining too, no, there's nobody you can call, sorry"), and I never felt good charging a lot of money for getting people out of bad spots.
I eventually noped out of this in favor of relaxing for a while in a slightly less hopeless part of the industry, but there's still a huge, under-served market of people who are getting hosed by sociopathic technology and would pay someone just to make it work again.
This happened to me many years ago. In the wake of the '08 financial crisis, I'd lost my job abruptly and decided to go travelling.
I'd accumulated a balance that was fairly substantial for me at the time (on the order of $10-15k, IIRC) and had been struggling to make the payments. I'd probably been 2-3 months behind on multiple occasions over the course of a year or so when a letter appeared that essentially said "we don't like you and we're going to close your account and pass your debt to a collection agency. However, if you pay off a portion of your balance in 4 monthly payments, and don't miss any of those payment dates, we'll wipe the rest."
I don't recall exactly what the discount was, but it was very substantial. In total I only had to pay something like 30-40% of the balance that I owed, so it was a very good deal. I'm not normally one to skip out on my debts but this was a huge relief to have a chance to be free of that debt: I pulled a lot of strings to make those payments on time!
True to their word, they wiped my entire balance and closed my account, and I never heard from them again (nor any collection agencies).
What's the waste of the software industry?
The waste is uncaptured value. It is some part of your software business's domain that is just too hard, expensive, or requiring physical intervention to encode the process in their system. So the business never chooses to build that feature. This leaves some part of your business's problem domain unsolved. Potentially someone else smaller could come in and try and solve that problem and capitalize on that wasted value.
> I will bet you that, in practice, they simply avoid collecting against anyone who demonstrates ability and financial resources to enforce their rights. This is one for the history books of borked equilibriums. We devoted substantial efforts to pro-consumer legislation to address abuse of (mostly) poor people. We gated redress behind labor that is abundantly available in the professional managerial class and scarce…
Singapore has many systems, rules and laws that would not and could not work elsewhere. It's great that it works for them, but it doesn't work in the USA, or most other countries. I will point out that they are an affluent, monocultural, somewhat xenophobic, authoritarian and borderline fascist city-state.
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> Giving people bad at personal finance a free ride is not I get what you're saying but if you've ever gotten to "I now have enough credit card debt for it to be A Problem", the baseline level of stress in your entire life gets pretty high. That doesn't mean that suddenly everyone has "learned their lesson forever", but especially for stuff like "I was bad at personal finance in my 20s, and now I am better but the de…
You've moved the goalposts with making it a family member. What about total strangers? Student loan debt is an entirely different thing though. I'm still on the fence about student loan forgiveness because I specifically stopped going to school because I did not want to take on the debt. It's a sensitive subject, and I am sympathetic to it. I'd be much more open to 0%, or partial payoff to reduce the obviously bloate…
The thing I was implicitly thinking is that you might do that for somebody you care about, and ultimately things like debt forgiveness programs are also about giving compassion to people you might not know.