debt collection law firm called me... need some legal advice

[mrvmax]

I am not knocking anyone here, just replying to a few things that were stated. There is a lot of good info in this thread, but I am once again adding my two cents. I grew up poor, lived without electricity and had to use foodstamps to survive when I was a kid. If you have ever gone hungry it is not a feeling you want to experience again - and I went hungry a lot when I was a kid (you could not tell now though). Because of that I had the drive to work and make money so I was pretty industrious at a young age (started mowing lawns, big lawns that people now use riding mowers for. You learn about hard work when mowing 2-3 acre yards with and old 3.5 horsepower push mower rebuilt from parts. I did those as well as my own yard, it was hard work but I always had a few dollars).
At 20 I ended up with a new baby and wife - along with a minimum wage job. I started working two minimum wage jobs (and 60-70 hours per week) just to survive (just barely though). With two jobs I never got a day off, but I was in my twenties so it was easier to handle. We had a couple of credit cards that we had to use in emergencies (like car repairs) and we would have been in trouble a few times without them. I knew though that I had to get better work to get out of the hole so I joined the Air Force. It was not something I really wanted to do, I felt I needed to do it to provide for my family so they did not have to live like I did when I was a kid. 4 years later I left as an E3 and had money saved up so we could live until I found work. I ended up working in the chemical plants and over the last 20 years have progressed up in the organization and now make a good living (especially since you consider I do not have a degree).
I learned the hard way about what credit cards can do and it took me over 20 years to become debt free but I paid off every bit of money I owed. Along the way I have built up a savings account as well as 401k and pension. I made the statements I did since I was in some pretty rough times yet I paid every penny I owed and every debt I incurred. I worked hard it it was not easy but I did it. I think bankruptcy is an easy button but most people could do without it if they would change their lifestyles. Some people I am close to filed for bankruptcy but they could have made it if they would have changed their lifestyles to match their income. They squandered away all the money they made when things were good, then when the money stopped coming they felt they needed to live the same lifestyle. That is irresponsible and writing off their debt should not have been allowed - but that is my opinion.
You can live without any debt, even when starting out. Do not believe the hype and what you see. Now, you will not be able to have the boats, cars, vacations, guns etc. that your friends have, but it can be done. Being debt free equates to living a lifestyle that fits your income. The problem is that people see others and want to live like them even if their income does not support it. There are going to be a lot of people in bad shape when they get older, all the fast, irresponsible living will catch up with you eventually.
One more thing to add, I never had a job I really wanted to do (except for now, being and FFL is something I always wanted to do but I do not make a living off it). I took whatever work I could to survive, there were many days (and still are) that I do not want to put up with what the job entails but I kept on going and forcing myself to. I did what I had to in order to provide for my family regardless of the circumstances. Today I see many people that are too picky and too lazy to work and they are reaping the reward for their efforts.

[gringo pistolero]

How would y'all feel if somebody borrowed your car and didn't return it? Or returned only parts of it?

Do unto others as you would have them do to you.

[VoiceofReason]

First let me point out to the OP, the two links I posted not only contain very good information, you can read the law. It is worth spending some time on.

Your post has a lot of good information that I hope helps others. One point I was trying to make is that some people can end up in financial trouble through no fault of their own.

I have learned not to be too quick to judge others, because I probably don’t have all the information. I learned that a few times the hard way. A couple of times I have formed an opinion on someone and learned a few things about them later that made me ashamed of myself.

I have also been judged by people that don’t know all the facts and probably never will. Some of those people may be incapable of being ashamed.

We all have choices. Some people make poor choices and some only have bad choices to choose from.

[Redneck_Buddha]

Dave Ramsey was the best person I've read for advice on restoring and maintaining financial health and independence. Some may call my credit "shot" nowadays, but only because I don't use any.

[mrvmax]

[quote="VoiceofReason"]One point I was trying to make is that some people can end up in financial trouble through no fault of their own. quote]
I am trying to think of how someone can get into financial trouble through no fault of their own and I can think of very few circumstances. Every circumstance I have seen could have been prevented. I am not trying to judge others, just reminding people that we are responsible for our own choices.

[VoiceofReason]

One point I was trying to make is that some people can end up in financial trouble through no fault of their own. quote]
I am trying to think of how someone can get into financial trouble through no fault of their own and I can think of very few circumstances. Every circumstance I have seen could have been prevented. I am not trying to judge others, just reminding people that we are responsible for our own choices.

Did you read my post?

Believe me I didn’t choose to injure my back and I did not choose to be fired after 15 years with the company. I was told you can’t do the job any more so we no longer need you.

I will not attempt to change an opinion set in stone. I sincerely hope you never find out first hand.

Another thing I have learned, some of it firsthand. If a person has a preset inflexible opinion, then find themselves in that situation, the harder it is for them to deal with it.

[snatchel]

Wow. I'm actually sad that I opened and read through this thread.

[Dragonfighter]

I don't know what they can do, but according to Dave Ramsey, if you have some money, make a "Paid in full offer" for pennies on the dollar, if they accept, get it in writing and NEVER let them draft your account.
ONLY send them money orders or cashiers checks.
If they turn down your offer, tell them that is the best they are going to get.
When they call tomorrow, make the same offer, eventually they will accept it.

Dave Ramsey says that these are "bottom feeders" that buy bad paper, add on tons of illegitimite fees and start harrassing people. IF there is still debt there, make the offer and if they agree, get it inwriting BEFORE you make payment and NEVER give access to any accounts. If there is no debt (about 70% of the time according to Ramsey) fire back, get contact information and addresses and give them ONE chance to back off or you are coming after them.

[bauer]

Wow. I'm actually sad that I opened and read through this thread.

Why is that? Because you have been fortunate enough in life not to have fallen prey to predatory creditors or circumstances that are beyond your control? There is a wealth of information in this thread that many may find useful. Add to that all the life experiences and insight that many forum members have shared and suddenly we have a very useful, informative thread for those that have fallen in to the trap of credit and all its downfalls. It is the condescending tone that is present in your reply that many want to avoid and ultimately why a lot of people that need help do not ask for it. The OP wanted advice and has received an ample amount, what he does not need is a negative attitude towards the topic.

I advocate taking responsibility for all your personal debts and I agree that paying them off does help build character. Having said that though, there are countless people (even some in this thread) out there that have fallen victim to their circumstances (lost job, disability, downright dishonest creditors, etc).

My run in with a collector,
When I was an E-3 living in the barracks on Ft. Stewart I decided to pay for internet in my barracks room. There was a private company, American Warrior Network (AWN), on post that provided all the internet and tv services to the barracks and you had to go through them. When you signed up for service they provided a modem for hookup in the room and then you had to pay a monthly fee for service. Everything was all fine and dandy while I had the service and was using it. Several months later when I moved to an off base apartment I shut off my service with AWN and returned their equipment, paid my final balance and thought I was done. Fast forward a year and half later and upon returning from Iraq I happened to run a credit report. Low and behold, AWN had placed a collection on my report for a balance of right around 300$ for unreturned equipment and final bill. I called the collection agency directly asking them what was going on, explained what happened and sure enough they had no idea. Like I said earlier, I advocate paying your own debt but in this case I was not going to pay for a debt I did not incur. I had the collection agency dispute the collection on my report (which they did very willingly) and now have it off my report. I got lucky in this case that the collection agency was willing to work with me to get a resolution instead of trying to be all hard nosed and hound dog after the money I supposedly owed them. Some people are not so lucky and draw dishonest and unethical debt collectors who only want to bleed a turnip and do not care about the destruction they leave behind.

[The Annoyed Man]

Wow. I'm actually sad that I opened and read through this thread.

Why is that? Because you have been fortunate enough in life not to have fallen prey to predatory creditors or circumstances that are beyond your control? There is a wealth of information in this thread that many may find useful. Add to that all the life experiences and insight that many forum members have shared and suddenly we have a very useful, informative thread for those that have fallen in to the trap of credit and all its downfalls. It is the condescending tone that is present in your reply that many want to avoid and ultimately why a lot of people that need help do not ask for it. The OP wanted advice and has received an ample amount, what he does not need is a negative attitude towards the topic.

I advocate taking responsibility for all your personal debts and I agree that paying them off does help build character. Having said that though, there are countless people (even some in this thread) out there that have fallen victim to their circumstances (lost job, disability, downright dishonest creditors, etc).

My run in with a collector,
When I was an E-3 living in the barracks on Ft. Stewart I decided to pay for internet in my barracks room. There was a private company, American Warrior Network (AWN), on post that provided all the internet and tv services to the barracks and you had to go through them. When you signed up for service they provided a modem for hookup in the room and then you had to pay a monthly fee for service. Everything was all fine and dandy while I had the service and was using it. Several months later when I moved to an off base apartment I shut off my service with AWN and returned their equipment, paid my final balance and thought I was done. Fast forward a year and half later and upon returning from Iraq I happened to run a credit report. Low and behold, AWN had placed a collection on my report for a balance of right around 300$ for unreturned equipment and final bill. I called the collection agency directly asking them what was going on, explained what happened and sure enough they had no idea. Like I said earlier, I advocate paying your own debt but in this case I was not going to pay for a debt I did not incur. I had the collection agency dispute the collection on my report (which they did very willingly) and now have it off my report. I got lucky in this case that the collection agency was willing to work with me to get a resolution instead of trying to be all hard nosed and hound dog after the money I supposedly owed them. Some people are not so lucky and draw dishonest and unethical debt collectors who only want to bleed a turnip and do not care about the destruction they leave behind.

Bauer, First, thank you for your service, and my prayers for the family and loved ones of SSG Ward. God speed SSG Ward.

We should be sad.....and before you criticize me, go back and read the descriptions of my own past troubles. The reason I say that "we should be sad" is because look at what a scourge credit has become. Look at the wreckage it has made of people's lives. Look at how far unscrupulous people have gone to profit off of the misery of others. Look at the part it has played in the society's trend away from reverence for personal responsibility. And yet, we are and should always remain a capitalist free-market economy because our very liberty depends upon it as much as on anything else. The issue of credit has become a cultural abscess.

Would you like other examples of "cultural abscesses" which have brought or are bringing about the downfall of western civilization in order to better illustrate what I'm talking about (keeping in mind that legal/illegal have less to do with these things than changing morality over the years)? I'm 60, and my dad died in 1990 at age 67. He was born May 23, 1923, so he would would be 90 years old three days from now. He fought in WW2 as a 2nd Lt., USMC, and was WIA at Iwo Jima. After the war, he acquired two Ph.D.s in Literature and was a professor at Caltech at the time of his death. He was a left-leaning democrat all of his life. We had a conversation over lunch one day when I was maybe 28-30 years old, and I was struggling with some areas of my life—loneliness, financial hardship, and some other things. We were talking about a lot of issues in modern life, and he told me that he felt sorry for my generation. When I asked him why, he said it was because we had to make a lot of decisions that his generation and generations before had never had to make.....not because these things did not exist, but because the decision to engage/NOT engage in them was a "cultural no-brainer".......and the answer would almost always be "HECK no!" They didn't even have to think about the answer because it was an automatic "NO!"

• Premarital sex. I started to write a whole dissertation about this one, but decided not to. Suffice it to say that sexual morality for today's teens is NOTHING like it was for teens in 1938 when my dad was 15. If you're interested in some the numbers, I'll be glad to PM them to you. But the bottom line is that, regardless of one's moral position on this, we pay a huge price as a society for the loss of standards of sexual behavior....in unwanted teenaged pregnancies, in abortion numbers (see below), in STD's, in the sexualization of our children at early ages, etc., etc. The numbers are staggering, but in 1938, society had very little of these issues to deal with. I'm not saying that the issues didn't exist; they just didn't exist to the sheer extent that they do today, and the numbers have gone up waaaaay out of proportion to the increase in population in the 75 years from 1938 to 2013.
• 1938's "Parents" have become "my kid's best friend" today. Corporal punishment is discouraged by the state, so young parents have fewer and fewer options to discipline their kids than I had, or my dad had.....and kids NEED discipline. They even WANT it sometimes. Often parents today substitute bribery for discipline. They substitute material goods for quality time with mom and dad. Is it any wonder that kids, not having any adults they can count on, try so hard to be adults themselves....with all the "privileges" of adulthood? This is a "cultural abscess."
• Abortion. Doesn't matter what you or I think about it today from a moral/legal standpoint. Back in 1935 it was nearly unheard of. Some doctors would do it, but not very many would, and the primary reason for it was to hide the shame of being pregnant out of wedlock. More abortion recipients were the daughters of privilege who could afford to pay a doctor to do one and then shut up about it, than they were the daughters of poverty. Poor people just went ahead and had the babies....and got more poor. But rich or poor, the numbers are inarguably hundreds of times higher today than they were in the 1930s. Senator Barbara "I have a schrader valve in my neck" Boxer has claimed that if Roe v. Wade were overturned, there would be a minium of 5,000 female deaths a year (not to mention the 100% fatality rate for the babies) from illegal abortions. But that number is 77 year old figure going back to the days before penicillin and birth control pills (http://www.factcheck.org/society/aborti ... tions.html). In 1938, there were only 86 reported abortions in the entire nation (even back then, there was such a thing as a legal abortion, just not for reason of birth control) compared to 2,286,962 live births (http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/ ... tates.html)—an abortion/live birth ratio of 0.00003760447266. In 2008, there were 1,212,350 reported against 4,247,694 live births—an abortion/live birth ratio of 0.28541368563743. When you take miscarriage and other sources of prenatal fatalities out of the equation, 22.2% of all remaining pregnancies result in an abortion. More than 1/5 of them. If that is not a cause for sadness, I don't know what is. We have given permission to our young women to kill their offspring, a thing that was nearly unthinkable in 1938, even though the medical technology existed back then to do abortions, even relatively safely if all precautions were observed. This represents a major area of degradation of the culture and has become a "cultural abscess."
• Drug use.... When my dad was in high school, the only people who smoked "reefer" were the same kids who stole cars and ended up serving prison terms; OR were "loose women" who were more or less shunned by the rest of society. Heroin addicts were a MUCH smaller percentage of the population then than they are now. There was no such thing as "crack" cocaine. Methamphetamines were something that the Army and Marine Corps issued to men in ground combat so that they could stay awake for longer under exhausting conditions. But recreational drug users were "bad people." They were the same people who were as likely to steal your car or shank you as they were to smoke a joint with you. It took MY generation to really screw that one up. The consequences today? A whole federal bureaucracy called the DEA. A four decades long "war on drugs" which has cost us trillions by now, and which has netted us not one single thing by way of reducing drug use, or getting drugs off our streets. An increasingly militant movement to make drug use a "right," supported by the state. When my dad was a teen, people who used drugs, for the most part, lived at the very bottom of society. They were beneath the poor. If they starved, nobody cared. If they committed crimes in order to pay for their habits, they were shot down or imprisoned just like any other common criminal. People who used actually had shame about their use. Not today.
• Credit. In 1935, here were the primary kinds of commercially available credit: vehicle loans, small business loans, farm loans, mortgages, secured personal loans, and pawns.....ALL secured credit, meaning that some kind of property belonging to the borrower secured the loan for the lender. If the borrower defaulted on the loan, the lender took the security to recoup their loss—a very fair system. Under such a system, credit is a product which you buy. Under that kind of system, you may well be under duress and really need the money you are borrowing, but nobody is putting a gun to your head and MAKING you borrow it. So if you get into trouble and default on the loan, the loss of securing property may be a bitter pill to swallow, but it is a natural consequence of the default, and it discharges the obligation.....which is why it wasn't until the 1990s that real estate lenders would start loaning amounts in excess of the value of a piece of property. As long as they didn't loan more than the was worth, they wouldn't take a bath if they had to foreclose. Obviously there were occasional exceptions to this—the dustbowl years for instance—but as a general truth, this works.
  
  Enter the 1950s and credit cards, and the beginning of the nation's fondness for unsecured debt. Here's a great link: http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card- ... y-1264.php. In the early 1900s, oil companies began issuing charge cards, but they were only good for that company's products. It wasn't until 1946 that the first "bank credit card" appeared, issued by a Brooklyn bank. The caveats were that the charges had to be locally made, and the bearer had to have an account at that Brooklyn bank. Diners Club was the first "major" credit card, and it started in the early 1950s. In 1959, American Express issued the first plastic credit card. I remember that my dad had one but he seldom used it, but I remember him using it in France when we were there in 1960. Basically, the reason you had an AmEx card back then was to use while travelling, and then you'd square it up when you got home.
  
  It wasn't until 1959 that credit card issues allowed the user to carry a balance forward. Until then, all accounts had to be paid in full at month's end. If the bill went unpaid and the borrower eventually defaulted, the lender was only out a fairly small amount. As long as that was the case, lenders could issue credit at favorable terms because their overhead was not nearly as high. But once debtors could carry balances forward, make minimum payments, and continue to increase their debt, the writing was on the wall.
  
  Bank of America was the first bank to issue a "general purpose" credit card with a revolving balance. The card was "Visa," and it was in 1966. I was 14 years old then, I'm old enough to remember a lot of these developments. I even remember the first Visa card ads on TV. But the point is that, up until this time, most people still either paid with cash or checks, and credit cards were seen as sort of "emergency funds" which would be used only to fund those things which would have taken too much of a bite out of a monthly budget.....things like a major vehicle repair, or annual rituals like Christmas shopping. But they weren't using a piece of plastic to pay for EVERYthing.
  
  When banks began to issue Visa/ATM or MC/ATM cards, that added a whole new dimension to the issue because now people stopped thinking of their daily purchases in terms of available cash. If you have $200/month (just to name a figure) to spend on groceries, and you and your spouse set aside $200 in cash in a "groceries" envelope, then it forces you to consider how today's purchase is going to affect this month.....because you can see the cash disappearing. You can see the consequence of the expenditure: less money available for groceries until the beginning of next month. Well, that is how most people used to live. They might have suffered poverty, but they didn't stagger under a burden of debt.
  
  At some point, people come to view credit as an entitlement....not something they earn. And ever since the 1980s, the federal government has place banks in the unenviable position of being forced to loan money to people who can't pay it back, or be in violation of laws written by communists in Congress. Credit is another cultural abscess.

Like any other abscess, these cultural abscesses have to be drained and dried up before they turn into a systemic toxemia so bad that it kills the patient—our culture, our society, our legal structures, our moral backbone, our nation. And like all of these "big picture" items, at the end of the day, the cure boils down to discipline at the level of the individual....even when that discipline is difficult and it hurts.

As far as snatchel goes, bauer, you should know that he did NOT grow up in the lap of luxury. He worked in highschool to help his parents feed the family, instead of being out goofing off with his peers. Luxury was not an option for them. And by the way, like you, he is a combat veteran in Iraq....multiple deployments if I recall correctly, in a...let's just call it "difficult" branch of the services. Super nice guy, very hard working, who has used his VERY recent good fortune in job placement to build his personal savings up instead of blowing it on toys—against the day when his good fortune turns south. In other words, he's making good choices today, so that he won't have to make bad choices tomorrow when the winds blow in another direction. A good man to have on your side in a fight, and my good fortune to know him. One of the people I've gotten to know on this forum whom I categorize as wheat, not chaff, and a friendship I have deliberately cultivated.

Just letting you know.

As far as all the other stuff, the natural human tendency is to get bogged down in the details of our hardships, while losing sight of the larger picture. We ALL play a part in the larger picture individually, and the current national credit debacle (not the government's debt, I mean the collective debt of private citizens) is the result of millions upon millions of poor decisions, often made by people who think (mistakenly) that they don't have any alternative but to just walk on their debt. But that's not true. They DO have alternatives.....alternatives that will allow them to keep their honor, with real humility and without false pride.....they just don't know it. I appreciate your sympathy for people caught in this plight. It means you have a heart, and we SHOULD have a heart. God means for us to be there for one another.........NOT government, but individuals caring for and about other individuals. If your heart went out to someone in this fix, and you knew there was a way for them to honorably discharge their obligations without sinking further into debt, you'd want to share that information with them rather than telling them to just walk away from the debt, right?

I'm trusting that you're a decent enough person that you'd agree with that.

[bauer]

Wow. I'm actually sad that I opened and read through this thread.

Why is that? Because you have been fortunate enough in life not to have fallen prey to predatory creditors or circumstances that are beyond your control? There is a wealth of information in this thread that many may find useful. Add to that all the life experiences and insight that many forum members have shared and suddenly we have a very useful, informative thread for those that have fallen in to the trap of credit and all its downfalls. It is the condescending tone that is present in your reply that many want to avoid and ultimately why a lot of people that need help do not ask for it. The OP wanted advice and has received an ample amount, what he does not need is a negative attitude towards the topic.

I advocate taking responsibility for all your personal debts and I agree that paying them off does help build character. Having said that though, there are countless people (even some in this thread) out there that have fallen victim to their circumstances (lost job, disability, downright dishonest creditors, etc).

My run in with a collector,
When I was an E-3 living in the barracks on Ft. Stewart I decided to pay for internet in my barracks room. There was a private company, American Warrior Network (AWN), on post that provided all the internet and tv services to the barracks and you had to go through them. When you signed up for service they provided a modem for hookup in the room and then you had to pay a monthly fee for service. Everything was all fine and dandy while I had the service and was using it. Several months later when I moved to an off base apartment I shut off my service with AWN and returned their equipment, paid my final balance and thought I was done. Fast forward a year and half later and upon returning from Iraq I happened to run a credit report. Low and behold, AWN had placed a collection on my report for a balance of right around 300$ for unreturned equipment and final bill. I called the collection agency directly asking them what was going on, explained what happened and sure enough they had no idea. Like I said earlier, I advocate paying your own debt but in this case I was not going to pay for a debt I did not incur. I had the collection agency dispute the collection on my report (which they did very willingly) and now have it off my report. I got lucky in this case that the collection agency was willing to work with me to get a resolution instead of trying to be all hard nosed and hound dog after the money I supposedly owed them. Some people are not so lucky and draw dishonest and unethical debt collectors who only want to bleed a turnip and do not care about the destruction they leave behind.

Bauer, First, thank you for your service, and my prayers for the family and loved ones of SSG Ward. God speed SSG Ward.

We should be sad.....and before you criticize me, go back and read the descriptions of my own past troubles. The reason I say that "we should be sad" is because look at what a scourge credit has become. Look at the wreckage it has made of people's lives. Look at how far unscrupulous people have gone to profit off of the misery of others. Look at the part it has played in the society's trend away from reverence for personal responsibility. And yet, we are and should always remain a capitalist free-market economy because our very liberty depends upon it as much as on anything else. The issue of credit has become a cultural abscess.

Would you like other examples of "cultural abscesses" which have brought or are bringing about the downfall of western civilization in order to better illustrate what I'm talking about (keeping in mind that legal/illegal have less to do with these things than changing morality over the years)? I'm 60, and my dad died in 1990 at age 67. He was born May 23, 1923, so he would would be 90 years old three days from now. He fought in WW2 as a 2nd Lt., USMC, and was WIA at Iwo Jima. After the war, he acquired two Ph.D.s in Literature and was a professor at Caltech at the time of his death. He was a left-leaning democrat all of his life. We had a conversation over lunch one day when I was maybe 28-30 years old, and I was struggling with some areas of my life—loneliness, financial hardship, and some other things. We were talking about a lot of issues in modern life, and he told me that he felt sorry for my generation. When I asked him why, he said it was because we had to make a lot of decisions that his generation and generations before had never had to make.....not because these things did not exist, but because the decision to engage/NOT engage in them was a "cultural no-brainer".......and the answer would almost always be "HECK no!" They didn't even have to think about the answer because it was an automatic "NO!"

• Premarital sex. I started to write a whole dissertation about this one, but decided not to. Suffice it to say that sexual morality for today's teens is NOTHING like it was for teens in 1938 when my dad was 15. If you're interested in some the numbers, I'll be glad to PM them to you. But the bottom line is that, regardless of one's moral position on this, we pay a huge price as a society for the loss of standards of sexual behavior....in unwanted teenaged pregnancies, in abortion numbers (see below), in STD's, in the sexualization of our children at early ages, etc., etc. The numbers are staggering, but in 1938, society had very little of these issues to deal with. I'm not saying that the issues didn't exist; they just didn't exist to the sheer extent that they do today, and the numbers have gone up waaaaay out of proportion to the increase in population in the 75 years from 1938 to 2013.
• 1938's "Parents" have become "my kid's best friend" today. Corporal punishment is discouraged by the state, so young parents have fewer and fewer options to discipline their kids than I had, or my dad had.....and kids NEED discipline. They even WANT it sometimes. Often parents today substitute bribery for discipline. They substitute material goods for quality time with mom and dad. Is it any wonder that kids, not having any adults they can count on, try so hard to be adults themselves....with all the "privileges" of adulthood? This is a "cultural abscess."
• Abortion. Doesn't matter what you or I think about it today from a moral/legal standpoint. Back in 1935 it was nearly unheard of. Some doctors would do it, but not very many would, and the primary reason for it was to hide the shame of being pregnant out of wedlock. More abortion recipients were the daughters of privilege who could afford to pay a doctor to do one and then shut up about it, than they were the daughters of poverty. Poor people just went ahead and had the babies....and got more poor. But rich or poor, the numbers are inarguably hundreds of times higher today than they were in the 1930s. Senator Barbara "I have a schrader valve in my neck" Boxer has claimed that if Roe v. Wade were overturned, there would be a minium of 5,000 female deaths a year (not to mention the 100% fatality rate for the babies) from illegal abortions. But that number is 77 year old figure going back to the days before penicillin and birth control pills (http://www.factcheck.org/society/aborti ... tions.html). In 1938, there were only 86 reported abortions in the entire nation (even back then, there was such a thing as a legal abortion, just not for reason of birth control) compared to 2,286,962 live births (http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/ ... tates.html)—an abortion/live birth ratio of 0.00003760447266. In 2008, there were 1,212,350 reported against 4,247,694 live births—an abortion/live birth ratio of 0.28541368563743. When you take miscarriage and other sources of prenatal fatalities out of the equation, 22.2% of all remaining pregnancies result in an abortion. More than 1/5 of them. If that is not a cause for sadness, I don't know what is. We have given permission to our young women to kill their offspring, a thing that was nearly unthinkable in 1938, even though the medical technology existed back then to do abortions, even relatively safely if all precautions were observed. This represents a major area of degradation of the culture and has become a "cultural abscess."
• Drug use.... When my dad was in high school, the only people who smoked "reefer" were the same kids who stole cars and ended up serving prison terms; OR were "loose women" who were more or less shunned by the rest of society. Heroin addicts were a MUCH smaller percentage of the population then than they are now. There was no such thing as "crack" cocaine. Methamphetamines were something that the Army and Marine Corps issued to men in ground combat so that they could stay awake for longer under exhausting conditions. But recreational drug users were "bad people." They were the same people who were as likely to steal your car or shank you as they were to smoke a joint with you. It took MY generation to really screw that one up. The consequences today? A whole federal bureaucracy called the DEA. A four decades long "war on drugs" which has cost us trillions by now, and which has netted us not one single thing by way of reducing drug use, or getting drugs off our streets. An increasingly militant movement to make drug use a "right," supported by the state. When my dad was a teen, people who used drugs, for the most part, lived at the very bottom of society. They were beneath the poor. If they starved, nobody cared. If they committed crimes in order to pay for their habits, they were shot down or imprisoned just like any other common criminal. People who used actually had shame about their use. Not today.
• Credit. In 1935, here were the primary kinds of commercially available credit: vehicle loans, small business loans, farm loans, mortgages, secured personal loans, and pawns.....ALL secured credit, meaning that some kind of property belonging to the borrower secured the loan for the lender. If the borrower defaulted on the loan, the lender took the security to recoup their loss—a very fair system. Under such a system, credit is a product which you buy. Under that kind of system, you may well be under duress and really need the money you are borrowing, but nobody is putting a gun to your head and MAKING you borrow it. So if you get into trouble and default on the loan, the loss of securing property may be a bitter pill to swallow, but it is a natural consequence of the default, and it discharges the obligation.....which is why it wasn't until the 1990s that real estate lenders would start loaning amounts in excess of the value of a piece of property. As long as they didn't loan more than the was worth, they wouldn't take a bath if they had to foreclose. Obviously there were occasional exceptions to this—the dustbowl years for instance—but as a general truth, this works.
  
  Enter the 1950s and credit cards, and the beginning of the nation's fondness for unsecured debt. Here's a great link: http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card- ... y-1264.php. In the early 1900s, oil companies began issuing charge cards, but they were only good for that company's products. It wasn't until 1946 that the first "bank credit card" appeared, issued by a Brooklyn bank. The caveats were that the charges had to be locally made, and the bearer had to have an account at that Brooklyn bank. Diners Club was the first "major" credit card, and it started in the early 1950s. In 1959, American Express issued the first plastic credit card. I remember that my dad had one but he seldom used it, but I remember him using it in France when we were there in 1960. Basically, the reason you had an AmEx card back then was to use while travelling, and then you'd square it up when you got home.
  
  It wasn't until 1959 that credit card issues allowed the user to carry a balance forward. Until then, all accounts had to be paid in full at month's end. If the bill went unpaid and the borrower eventually defaulted, the lender was only out a fairly small amount. As long as that was the case, lenders could issue credit at favorable terms because their overhead was not nearly as high. But once debtors could carry balances forward, make minimum payments, and continue to increase their debt, the writing was on the wall.
  
  Bank of America was the first bank to issue a "general purpose" credit card with a revolving balance. The card was "Visa," and it was in 1966. I was 14 years old then, I'm old enough to remember a lot of these developments. I even remember the first Visa card ads on TV. But the point is that, up until this time, most people still either paid with cash or checks, and credit cards were seen as sort of "emergency funds" which would be used only to fund those things which would have taken too much of a bite out of a monthly budget.....things like a major vehicle repair, or annual rituals like Christmas shopping. But they weren't using a piece of plastic to pay for EVERYthing.
  
  When banks began to issue Visa/ATM or MC/ATM cards, that added a whole new dimension to the issue because now people stopped thinking of their daily purchases in terms of available cash. If you have $200/month (just to name a figure) to spend on groceries, and you and your spouse set aside $200 in cash in a "groceries" envelope, then it forces you to consider how today's purchase is going to affect this month.....because you can see the cash disappearing. You can see the consequence of the expenditure: less money available for groceries until the beginning of next month. Well, that is how most people used to live. They might have suffered poverty, but they didn't stagger under a burden of debt.
  
  At some point, people come to view credit as an entitlement....not something they earn. And ever since the 1980s, the federal government has place banks in the unenviable position of being forced to loan money to people who can't pay it back, or be in violation of laws written by communists in Congress. Credit is another cultural abscess.

Like any other abscess, these cultural abscesses have to be drained and dried up before they turn into a systemic toxemia so bad that it kills the patient—our culture, our society, our legal structures, our moral backbone, our nation. And like all of these "big picture" items, at the end of the day, the cure boils down to discipline at the level of the individual....even when that discipline is difficult and it hurts.

As far as snatchel goes, bauer, you should know that he did NOT grow up in the lap of luxury. He worked in highschool to help his parents feed the family, instead of being out goofing off with his peers. Luxury was not an option for them. And by the way, like you, he is a combat veteran in Iraq....multiple deployments if I recall correctly, in a...let's just call it "difficult" branch of the services. Super nice guy, very hard working, who has used his VERY recent good fortune in job placement to build his personal savings up instead of blowing it on toys—against the day when his good fortune turns south. In other words, he's making good choices today, so that he won't have to make bad choices tomorrow when the winds blow in another direction. A good man to have on your side in a fight, and my good fortune to know him. One of the people I've gotten to know on this forum whom I categorize as wheat, not chaff, and a friendship I have deliberately cultivated.

Just letting you know.

As far as all the other stuff, the natural human tendency is to get bogged down in the details of our hardships, while losing sight of the larger picture. We ALL play a part in the larger picture individually, and the current national credit debacle (not the government's debt, I mean the collective debt of private citizens) is the result of millions upon millions of poor decisions, often made by people who think (mistakenly) that they don't have any alternative but to just walk on their debt. But that's not true. They DO have alternatives.....alternatives that will allow them to keep their honor, with real humility and without false pride.....they just don't know it. I appreciate your sympathy for people caught in this plight. It means you have a heart, and we SHOULD have a heart. God means for us to be there for one another.........NOT government, but individuals caring for and about other individuals. If your heart went out to someone in this fix, and you knew there was a way for them to honorably discharge their obligations without sinking further into debt, you'd want to share that information with them rather than telling them to just walk away from the debt, right?

I'm trusting that you're a decent enough person that you'd agree with that.

I am with you 100% TAM. Please do not mistake that. I feel that my position was not clear enough. When I read "Wow. I'm actually sad that I opened and read through this thread" it came off not that the poster was sad at the state of the current credit situation in America but sad that people were having issues and then coming on the boards and asking for advice. Every post after the OP's was construed in an attempt to provide insight and advice, minus the one I quoted. It added nothing to the conversation other than putting off a bad vibe, a vibe that I think many fear when asking for advice. I do not know Snatchel's background, all I was going off was how his comment was presented. I never once judged his character based off his post, I simply stated how I felt the post was presented and how that presentation could have a potentially negative impact on others who may be thinking of asking for help. I apologize if my post came off as a personal attack on Snatchel, I was not intended that way in the least bit.

If your heart went out to someone in this fix, and you knew there was a way for them to honorably discharge their obligations without sinking further into debt, you'd want to share that information with them rather than telling them to just walk away from the debt, right?

I'm trusting that you're a decent enough person that you'd agree with that.

If you read my post I stated that I advocate taking responsibility for all your personal debts. I never once implied that anyone should simply just walk away from their debt. However, there are certain circumstances that may prevent an individual from immediately paying back their debts, and when thats the case things snowball out control quickly unless the person knows how to handle the situation (there are numerous examples of how to handle different situations presented in this thread, one of which you yourself presented).

[SewTexas]

Back in 2000 my husband's company started laying people off....ah the tech bubble....Clinton's Economy problems that NO ONE talks about.
one lay-off, he survived, next lay-off, he survived....third lay-off, spring break of 2001, he was out.
we didn't worry, he'd get a new job....
we'd tighten our belts, stop throwing the extra money at our credit cards like we'd been doing (we'd been trying to pay them down, get out of debt )
spring came and went, we saw many of our friends get laid off
summer came and he was getting hits on his resume, Sept came and a firm in NYC emailed him and set up a phone interview, that's how desperate we were
then planes flew into buildings, the firm was decimated, the interview never happened, and people stopped hiring.
my husband took any and every part-time job he could get and I worked at a child-care where I could take my kids with me.

we filed bankruptcy, at the request of our creditors. we were praying on our way to the courthouse that if it wasn't G-d's will that he would give us a flat so we couldn't make it....when we left the court we understood the meaning of "Year of Jubilee".

Until you aren't sure how you are going to pay for your child's next cup of milk...well, I just praise Him that He always made sure there was just enough to do so, often no extra, but always enough.

[bizarrenormality]

Why should people who are capable of using credit responsibility be penalized for those who can't? isn't that a the heart of the anti gun argument?

[fickman]

I did credit card collections in college. It was a terrible job, but I learned quickly that there were two types of people in trouble: those who were proud, flaunting, and playing games, and those who were humble, humiliated, and really needed a break. Some were doctors who bought expensive equipment knowing they'd never pay it back because the debt was unsecured. Despicable. Some were small businesses wiped out in a hurricane, people who personally financed things for their business that ended up failing, many were people who lost everything in the market crash after 9/11 and had no customers to sell to, others were businesses who had to file bankruptcy because their customers filed bankruptcy and they wouldn't get paid after already incurring expenses. Others were thrust into debt by the death of a loved one or business partner.

To those who are unflinchingly saying all balances must be squared in every situation. . . just to poke the bear:
Is there ever a time and place for bankruptcy?

Should one's business be held to the same standard as their personal finances in this regard? (Only sole props and partnerships, or corporations, too?) A lot of small businesses seem to use the "Opps. Bankruptcy reset. Relaunch with new name and tax ID" strategy.

What is the answer for those who are dealing with massive medical debt through no fault of their own, or "woke up" after they were already in the hole? Try harder? Indentured servitude?

I think how somebody got into debt and their demeanor is important in the moral decision. Somebody who maxed their card out to buy a new home theater before filing bankruptcy is completely different from somebody who needed a new transmission to get to work or they'd lose their job. Somebody following the doctor's advice after a severe car accident or cancer diagnosis is different from somebody who keeps refinancing stuff so they can afford vacations.

A few quick things to muddy the water a little:
- In the credit card world, there's a number on their screen that they will NEVER tell you. It's called "Dollars at Risk". Typically, before you get to settlements, payoffs, bankruptcy, or a collection company, the inflated default interest rates and extra fees have helped the lender recover much of their actual cash at risk. I've seen accounts with balances of $10,000 that had $500 or less at risk. These accounts are often eligible for a huge discounted settlement offer, especially if they are far past due.

- Most of the collections conversations we're having are not regarding relationships with the actual lender.

If somebody's looking for an easy out to escape their own irresponsibility, I decry that.

If somebody is looking for genuine help in one of a myriad of truly desperate situations, I wouldn't dogpile on them for taking advantage of legal, above-board options available.

[bauer]

I did credit card collections in college. It was a terrible job, but I learned quickly that there were two types of people in trouble: those who were proud, flaunting, and playing games, and those who were humble, humiliated, and really needed a break. Some were doctors who bought expensive equipment knowing they'd never pay it back because the debt was unsecured. Despicable. Some were small businesses wiped out in a hurricane, people who personally financed things for their business that ended up failing, many were people who lost everything in the market crash after 9/11 and had no customers to sell to, others were businesses who had to file bankruptcy because their customers filed bankruptcy and they wouldn't get paid after already incurring expenses. Others were thrust into debt by the death of a loved one or business partner.

To those who are unflinchingly saying all balances must be squared in every situation. . . just to poke the bear:
Is there ever a time and place for bankruptcy?

Should one's business be held to the same standard as their personal finances in this regard? (Only sole props and partnerships, or corporations, too?) A lot of small businesses seem to use the "Opps. Bankruptcy reset. Relaunch with new name and tax ID" strategy.

What is the answer for those who are dealing with massive medical debt through no fault of their own, or "woke up" after they were already in the hole? Try harder? Indentured servitude?

I think how somebody got into debt and their demeanor is important in the moral decision. Somebody who maxed their card out to buy a new home theater before filing bankruptcy is completely different from somebody who needed a new transmission to get to work or they'd lose their job. Somebody following the doctor's advice after a severe car accident or cancer diagnosis is different from somebody who keeps refinancing stuff so they can afford vacations.

A few quick things to muddy the water a little:
- In the credit card world, there's a number on their screen that they will NEVER tell you. It's called "Dollars at Risk". Typically, before you get to settlements, payoffs, bankruptcy, or a collection company, the inflated default interest rates and extra fees have helped the lender recover much of their actual cash at risk. I've seen accounts with balances of $10,000 that had $500 or less at risk. These accounts are often eligible for a huge discounted settlement offer, especially if they are far past due.

- Most of the collections conversations we're having are not regarding relationships with the actual lender.

If somebody's looking for an easy out to escape their own irresponsibility, I decry that.

If somebody is looking for genuine help in one of a myriad of truly desperate situations, I wouldn't dogpile on them for taking advantage of legal, above-board options available.

and well said. Thank you for saying what I was trying to but could not put into words.