Having learned a few lessons about collections, I will say this, there are a few debt collectors that are reasonably professional and courteous. But there are many more who will try to brow beat you, threaten you and essentially treat you like a low life, who had purposely planned to stick it the banks who provided you the loan or the credit line.
I agree, I was over extend. But, if you look at my credit history, you’ll see spikes, where I ran my credit up, then paid it off. So, yes, I was over extend, but I had a plan.
Had I been allowed to complete my plan, all of my revolving debt would have been paid off, between 2-3 weeks after they started destroying my credit. So who's to blame...? Yeah, I'll accept my share of the blame, but had any of the lenders contacted me and allowed me to move forward, they would have been paid in full.
The other thing that is being missed in all this is, all these banks had huge marketing campaigns to entice consumers to use their credit. They provide huge incentives to their brokers to write loans and to make credit available, and they had the resources to do their due diligence.
Had they done their due diligence on me, they would have found I was over extended, and they wouldn’t have given me the credit, without more information or without some sort of collateral. They chose to provide credit to me and encouraged me to use it.
They were recklessly and knowingly writing loans that they knew were shady, because they were simply packaging them and selling them to investment pools.
Do I feel responsible and bad. Absolutely. But do I feel I should shoulder the entire responsibility - absolutely not, and neither should anybody else who got caught up in this mess.
With the amount of resources available to the lenders to keep tabs on the market, you can’t tell me they didn’t know the market was weakening. They chose to role the dice themselves, in order to maximize their profit.
Good banking policy does not condone writing loans or making credit available without a credit check and without some due diligence - beyond simply pulling ones credit score, as they did with me.
Another aspect of this situation that everyone seems to be missing is - the lenders themselves were responsible for the artificial inflation of property values.
By making funds available to everybody including unqualified individuals, they created a pool of buyers who shouldn’t have been in the market. These additional buyers caused there to be more competition for the available houses in the market, which in turn pushed the values up.
Had they done their due diligence and approved loans based on an individual's ability to pay, rather than creating income through fees, there wouldn’t have been the artificial inflation of values.
When I hear homeowners complain about folks walking away from houses that are over leveraged, and blaming these folks for the values of their own homes declining, they’re not looking at the big picture.
That’s not to say there haven’t been abuses. But each situation is different. I my own situation, I very definitely didn’t plan on this. Who'da thought five years ago, that we would be in the situation we are now, as a nation? Things were going good and I was a stones throw away from being golden. Both my renters had agreed to buy those homes - and wanted to, because I was giving them a good deal.
The banks helped create the buying frenzy that caused the “gold rush” in real estate. And they should suffer the consequences, just like everybody else.
I mean they did get a pretty good sized cash infusion - which was needed I suppose, to avoid complete collapse. However, more of that money could have been used to help folks in distress and keep folks in their homes.
Using the example of my little investment home. The lender could have retained the original mortgage amount, and simply adjusted the interest to relieve some to mortgage pressure and allow me to rent the property at a lower amount.
Had I been able to rent that property for $600 and cover the mortgage, insurance and taxes, that property would have continued to remain a viable
They could have adjusted the market value and refinanced the property - though in that scenario they would have lost money due to the tremendous reduction in market value.
I didn’t expect them to take that big a hit, but had they been willing to help reduce the monthly obligation, I would have been able to rent it and maybe wait for the market to rebound. Even if it took 10 years.
There’s simply no way I could have afforded to subsidize that mortgage for the foreseeable future. And from a business standpoint, it would have been really dumb. My shareholders, if I had, had any, would have ousted me.
Getting back to debt collectors. I received a call from an unknown number, which I "Googled." I found a site that had posts from various people who had received calls from that same number. Clearly a debt collector.
There were numerous posts from consumers, but surprisingly there were posts from that particular debt collector. Most of them defending themselves and making statements about the "dead beats" that don't pay there bills.
Now, again, I understand there have been abuses out there, but to assume somebody is a deadbeat simply because they have stopped paying their bills, is a stretch. People who make such judgements are individuals who have little life experiences.
Prior to my going under, one of the jobs I had was counseling others who were in arrears on their mortgage debt. I met a lot of people who had been forced to stop paying their mortgage. Often it was due to health reasons, with the second most common reason being loss of employment.
I went to visit one young family - husband, wife and 3 kids. She was a stay at home mom, and he was a construction worker who made a good income. With home building declining he was laid off from his job. But, he was re-employed almost immediately, and things were good. Until he broke his leg playing football with his buddies on the weekend.
That's when everything changed. His insurance with his new company hadn't kicked in. His old insurance had stopped and he couldn't work. By the time I met them, they were 3 months behind, with no way to catch up. He still wasn't cleared to work and his new employer let him go, because he hadn't made it through the initial grace period.
To top things off, during those three months the construction business had continued to decline. Even if he was able to work, there wasn't much out there. They lost their home.
Now, I suppose he was called a deadbeat and a liar, too.
My experience with debt collectors is they, themselves are delusional liars. Perhaps they have convinced themselves that everybody who is paying their debt are losers, to enable them to justify treating debtors so poorly.
After over 30 years of paying my creditors, qualifying for nearly $200,000 in revolving debt, controlling assets in excess of one million and maintaining or carrying numerous mortgages and car loans, in less than 2 months I became a low-life, deadbeat in the eyes of the lending community.
The tone of their voices and the brow beating I have experienced at the hands of these folks is intolerable. But, given they know nothing about me, I realize their statements are coming from a position of ignorance.
I have been around long enough to know that what goes around, comes around and that they will live to regret the way they have behaved.
For those of you who are having difficulty financially, don't let these people get under your skin. Instead, learn your rights.
Read the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA).
Knowledge is power folks. You can fight back!
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