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Credit card debt collection

bitsaboutmoney.com

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Re: Credit card debt collection

#431

Post by LorenPechtel »

pjc50 wrote: post #220
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, it also means things like getting denied for jobs and apartments. Car loans will be more: You might not be able to easily buy a new car. And that's not even getting into some of the other random things. You'll need to pay upfront to replace the washer that went out instead of financing - unless that financing is through one of the rent-to-own places (which still might be cheaper than going to the pay laund…

How on earth can people be denied jobs for poor credit? You're not a creditor to your employer! Isn't this just the "social credit" system that people worry about in China, except privatised?

The reality is that credit rating has a strong correlation with responsibility. Thus, for example, in places where it's legal to do so insurance rates will be different.

This does end up sweeping up a few who were hit by unavoidable circumstances but most people who get in credit trouble were skating too close to the edge.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#432

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #423
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no evidence either way, but it is not absurd in my opinion to suggest that people who make poor life decisions in one area of their lives might also make poor life decisions elsewhere.

A bad credit score doesn't really mean you've made bad choices. It just means you had some bad luck. The reasons for your bad luck can range from medical bills, job loss, missing work when poor (it snowballs) and other such things. It might mean you made a bad decision when you were 18, but it is still hanging around on your credit. You might have been in a financially abusive relationship. Shit happens, and it is na…

> A bad credit score doesn't really mean you've made bad choices.

It doesn't necessarily mean this, sure. But, if we found a thousand people with bad credit scores and did a deep audit, we wouldn't discover 1000 who had unavoidable, unpredictable misfortune. We likely wouldn't even find 500.

> Shit happens, and it is naive to think

I've heard alot of "shit happens" excuses over the years. Few of them struck me as "no matter what this person might have done, they were just fucked from day one". Shit doesn't happen, either in frequency or degree, nearly enough to explain the bad situations many are in. They tend to have alot of minor misfortunes sprinkled here and there among gigantic piles of poor decisions.

>And it isn't like you are going to get credit for paying most normal bills on time. Landlords and utilities rarely report positives to the agencies.

Funnily enough, I work adjacent to a company called Rent Dynamics, and one of the features that they offer is positive credit reporting for those who pay the rent on time. There are others that do this too.

I'm still skeptical of the concept.

Should some company hiring say "sure, he defaulted on that $18,000 of credit card debt 3 years ago, but look... he's paid his rent on time for the last 4 months knowing that if he screws that up he'll be evicted, and that counts for something!" ?

Is that feature worth the slow accretion of extra (and sometimes hidden) fees that are pushing housing/rental prices higher in an era of skyrocking housing costs? Remember, this isn't something that shows up for luxury apartments, it's for the not-quite-slums apartments.

We might find that landlords will do positive credit reporting here in the next few years, and that it's not the good thing you think it to be.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#433

Post by LorenPechtel »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #423
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no evidence either way, but it is not absurd in my opinion to suggest that people who make poor life decisions in one area of their lives might also make poor life decisions elsewhere.

A bad credit score doesn't really mean you've made bad choices. It just means you had some bad luck. The reasons for your bad luck can range from medical bills, job loss, missing work when poor (it snowballs) and other such things. It might mean you made a bad decision when you were 18, but it is still hanging around on your credit. You might have been in a financially abusive relationship. Shit happens, and it is na…

But how precarious your position was makes a big difference in how likely you are to have severe consequences from a particular bit of bad luck.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#434

Post by kelnos »

Reason077 wrote: post #177

One thing that's not mentioned in this article is that credit card companies will sometimes make last-ditch "clear your debt at a discount" offers before passing your debt on to a collection agency. 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…

As the article points out, the credit card company getting 30-40% was actually a great deal for them: if they had to sell your debt to collections, they probably would have only gotten 3-4% from that sale.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#435

Post by LorenPechtel »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #355
jiofj wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It isn't fair but in the US money carries moral weight, and many people assume the less of it you have, the worse of a person you are. This isn't about money, this is about debt. Owing money around really does sound like something a bad person would do.

It isn't about owing money or even debt. You can be in a lot of debt and have good credit. You can also have very little debt and have very poor credit because you couldn't pay a hospital bill or didn't get the final electric bill from your old apartment paid before it went to collections. It is really about keeping poor people out. You might be able to argue something about responsibility if you can prove that they…

Disagree. There's no intent to keep poor people out. Someone who has little but doesn't spend too much will generally have good credit.

Creditors these days tend to treat medical debt separately--someone who has only medical debt probably is someone who is responsible but something happened to them. Likewise, back in the era of the housing collapse and strategic default creditors would look at someone who had a foreclosure but nothing else far more favorably than someone who had a variety of debt issues.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#436

Post by flangola7 »

bequanna wrote: post #420
303uru wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, a "website designer" who's never deployed a website, was never hired to create one and who suffered zero injury gets a ruling. This SCOTUS is invalid.

Both political parties have endeavored to pack the courts with sympathetic judges. The conservatives got the Supreme Court majority by pure luck. The Democrats would have done the exact same if given the opportunity and then you’d have the Right crying about how the court is “invalid”. To change this, we should require some kind of supermajority to confirm judicial appointments at all levels.

[flagged]

Re: Credit card debt collection

#437

Post by LorenPechtel »

greenshackle2 wrote: post #428
Terr_ wrote: post #229

Recycling my post from when this link was submitted 32 days ago. _____ While I highly encourage everyone to read this in its entirely, I think it's worth a quick summary of the bits that may be personally-useful to those who don't: * If it comes to a lawsuit in a court case, DO NOT IGNORE IT. If you don't show up, collector gets a kind of automatic win called a default judgement, and that's how you end up losing your…

I'm in Canada so laws are different but what I found here is when I ask for proof they don't send it, they just sell the "debt" to a different agency and then I start getting harassed again 2 months later, rinse and repeat. (I put debt in quotes because the alleged debt is with a company I've never done business with, so I assume it's completely fake, mistaken identity, or identity theft.)

That happens here (US), also.

I got one that must have been mistaken, sent off the letter asking for evidence and it shows up from a new guy instead. Same letter to the new guy, it never returned.

There is one simple change I would like to see to the industry--if a debt is challenged it should be illegal to sell while the challenge clock is running and if it's not substantiated it should be illegal to sell, period. You should not have to play whack-a-mole with bogus or mistaken identity debt.

I would also like to see the FDCPA remedies applied to everyone--you should have the same causes of action even if it's not your debt.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#438

Post by flangola7 »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #433
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bad credit score doesn't really mean you've made bad choices. It just means you had some bad luck. The reasons for your bad luck can range from medical bills, job loss, missing work when poor (it snowballs) and other such things. It might mean you made a bad decision when you were 18, but it is still hanging around on your credit. You might have been in a financially abusive relationship. Shit happens, and it is na…

But how precarious your position was makes a big difference in how likely you are to have severe consequences from a particular bit of bad luck.

Yes but that's not their fault and they shouldn't be penalized for it.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#440

Post by LorenPechtel »

PopePompus wrote: post #407
alexis2b wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also in the Bible the notion of a 50 years periodic Jubilee[1] when all debts would be canceled and the system effectively resets. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical)

Wouldn't that kinda make it difficult for anyone to get a mortgage during year 49?

Yeah, it would play havoc with durable-goods industries in the last few years of the cycle.
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