Broke & Brilliant: A Survival Guide

"Creditor Scare Tactics"

Creditors, for some odd reason, get testy and act irrationally whenever they suspect that you have absolutely no intention of ever paying your debts. You need to be prepared for Creditor Scare Tactics. You need to read on.

Acceleration of payments:

Say you owe a credit card company $1,500. Your monthly payments are approximately $40. You have not paid this bill for the last six months. You are $240 behind in payments, all but $10 of which is interest.

You receive a phone call at 7:30 AM on a Saturday. You are disoriented and confused. Surprise! Surprise! The party with whom you are speaking is a collections representative of your credit card company.

Your new-found friend clearly states that you have not made a payment in over six months. This you already know. He then demands that you immediately pay the entire outstanding balance of your account, plus interest.

Something is amiss. His logic seems flawed: Since you can’t afford a $40 payment each month, then one single payment of $1,500 plus $230 interest should fit right into your budget, right? After yelling at you for an hour, he says that he will call you back. Will he ever!

Asking you to pay the entire amount owed when you can’t even afford one monthly installment just goes to prove that your new friend is completely out of his mind, right? Wrong. This is a common scare tactic used to make other senseless payment schemes seem slightly less insane. Subsequent efforts to extract money from you may include:

Three Post-Dated Checks:

Here, the entire amount you owe is divided into three equal payments. You are asked to write three checks to cover these payments, one check dated correctly and the other checks post-dated one month apart.

Never, ever send anyone a post-dated check, ever. This creditor-scare tactic preys upon the ever-present delusion of the Broke & Brilliant that “success and fortune is near.” Take it from me, success and fortune are never near enough to cover those post-dated checks.

Baseless Threats:

Once you have been deemed “uncooperative,” your creditors may resort to threatening you with nasty consequences if you refuse to heed their demands for payment. Since you followed my plan for a strategic poverty, all your debts are unsecured. Therefore, these “threats” are without merit. Unsecured creditors cannot take your car or your house, let alone all those drinks you bought on their credit card while holed-up in a seedy strip joint for the last three months of college.

Your creditor’s only recourse is to threaten you with a bad credit rating. This you already have. So, take charge. Threaten back. Say something like, “Well, with everybody hounding me for money, it looks like I will have to file bankruptcy.” Your words will be met with silence. Victory is at hand!

Of course, you will really never go through with bankruptcy procedures. It costs about $800 to file a simple bankruptcy. If you had $800, you wouldn’t need to file for bankruptcy, now would you?

Calls From an Attorney’s Office:

Uh oh! This sounds official. You are no longer being contacted by some bill-collecting peon, but by a representative of an attorney’s office. Ooooh, you’re in trouble now! Wrong.

You will never be contacted by the attorney himself because that putz is either some lackey who barely passed the bar and couldn’t hack it in private practice, or he simply does not exist.

Fight back! Invest in some fake letterhead at an office supply store and have your “attorney” (you) send their “attorney” some nasty letters. The calls will stop. For a while, at least.

Name Calling:

When you are as resilient to the above creditor scare tactics as I am, you leave your frustrated bill collector no option but to resort to kindergarten scare tactics like name calling.

Sure, hurl insults at me like “thief”, “deadbeat” and “slacker” and then ask for my money. That’s mature.

The Direct Approach:

I must admit, I have been rendered speechless by a creditor on only one occasion. The question posed to me was, “Do you have any intention of paying this bill at all?” My only response was a “Hmmmmm” that lasted for damn near fifteen minutes.

Well, I intend to pay back all my creditors -- someday. I also intended to be a millionaire by the time I was twenty-five. I’m still not sure how to answer this one.

Sometimes, you do not have the pleasure of speaking directly with your favorite bill collector. Don’t fear, they have other ways of contacting you:

Letters:

For some reason, bill collectors equate the mere fact that they have sent you a letter with your actually having read their letter. Fools! Hey, if you throw a letter in the trash before you open it, it’s a lot like you never received that letter in the first place!

The Auto-dialing Machine:

When you answer the phone and hear a recorded voice on the other end say, “I have an important message for you...” hang up immediately. Otherwise, you will be put on hold for fifteen minutes, until another message says, “All of our representatives are busy. We will call back later.” Or worse, you will be connected to a real person whose “important message” is that you owe them money.

These nimrods have no idea as to my priorities in life. If I were to be told that I won a free meal at a fancy restaurant, that would be an “important message.” But, when I find out that the “message” is that I owe vast sums of money, that is not important to me. The whole process is rather anticlimatic.

Answering Machine Messages:

Here, creditors feel that it is their right to use every scare tactic at their disposal in order to make you return their call. Resist temptations. Those messages are best left ignored! Take it from me, those “800-numbers” that they leave on your answering machine are not free calls!

No matter how many calls or letters or death threats you get from creditors, it is important to remember that you are in control. If you worry about how much money you owe, you will never be able to commit the time or energy to the projects that will make you the money needed to pay back all your debts.

You don’t need to listen to a bunch of creditors to tell you that your ambitious aspirations of fame and fortune are merely delusions of grandeur. You have your parents for that.

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(Since January 15, 1997)

Noonan
1010-B Ocean Boulevard
Isle of Palms, SC 29451
noonan@awod.com
(803) 886-8096

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Broke & Brilliant, A Survival Guide

** Through The Ages | Myths and Realities **
** Financing Your Poverty | Credit and its Consequences **
** Creditor Scare Tactics **