Old Sears Credit Card Debt

I am having difficulty finding the amazing, civilized, or responsible parts of the two clumsily composed entries by DPIF, now approaching a year old. This was a painfully typical kneejerk response which inevitably sprouts like a weed in forum discussions of debt problems, right down to the sloppy writing and insulting attitude.

Parachuting into a thread and cursing at everyone without even registering the context of discussion are not the actions of someone interested in rational exchange. With a user handle like "Debt Paid In Full", he'd already made up his mind and come to install a bully pulpit. There are plenty of cheap blogger sites which will host his broadcast rants if that's all he wants from the writing exercise.

Lone Stranger did an exemplary job of unpacking this forum jamming, which very often comes from collections industry shills as much as self-righteous uber-patriots who think that a zero balance is next to Godliness. They share a pervasive and faulty assumption that all debt is created through voluntary consumer action. The same assumption extends to a belief that all debtors are "bad people" and deserve any punishment, no matter how fraudulent or illegal or destructive to one's quality of life.

You will not find anyone in discussions like this who is cackling madly with unholy glee and bragging about what a deep screwing the lender in question got over a few hundred dollars in billing. You will also not find much agreement with the old canards of "Debtors are the reason for a failing economy" and "Debtors are the same as thieves". These are truly topics for a longer work, which Stranger and I and others have scratched at right along.

I personally recommend a comprehensive report issued a year ago by the National Consumer Law Center for a primer on the many facets of the consumer debt crisis.
"The Debt Machine" -- www.nclc.org/images/pdf/pr-reports/debt-machine.pdf

What the kneejerkers always miss is that if you want to promote "responsible" borrowing you must first have responsible lending, something which the Too Piggish To Fail banks have long ago classified as the slowest, worst way to turn a profit. This is why the honest borrower is a "deadbeat" and the sucker near or past default gets all the dysfunctionally loving attention.

Now, did anyone agree to Sears Credit terms with a gun to her spine? No, but the card "benefit" was likely sold across a counter by a Clearasil queen who cannot herself write a check without parental guidance, yet is playing financial advisor under strict orders from a floor manager who is baffled by the 'percent' key on a calculator. The card contract was likely full of language written in ant tracks to thoroughly disfavor the consumer, and was hurriedly amended each time the lender found it did not disfavor the customer enough.

I have written elsewhere in this thread about much of the Sears debt portfolio being uncollectably distressed. Surely Citi Group did not become the new underwriter in total ignorance of signifiers that too many accounts were very suspect if not outright bogus. Surely the worst performing accounts would not have been packaged and sold to hostile and lawbreaking junk debt buyers if they weren't already too poisonous to keep in-house.

Please, please let's not try to conclude that all of the aggravation and abuse which naturally flows from such a broken and lopsided credit system, in which absolutely everything that goes wrong is somehow labeled Someone Else's Problem in the chain of handlers, should rightfully come straight back to yoke the shoulders of the end user, who is stuck disentangling a mess of evasive phone calls and deliberately confusing documents.

When you have an industry which *thrives* on the decay of its customers, you cannot draw a one-to-one relationship between your neighbor's unpaid debt and your own perceived higher cost of credit. Such an industry will find a way to unfairly burden everyone no matter *what* everyone's spending and repayment behavior is. This is not the proper space, nor is there enough, for me to describe from personal experience how this is so, but I know from ongoing industry study how very much mine are not accidental or uncommon cases.

I have the same problem doing this to my 78 year old mother who has never been late. I wrote letters ect. Still having problem. They r rude and liars
.

I have the same problem doing this to my 78 year old mother who has never been late. I wrote letters ect. Still having problem. They r rude and liars
.

You have some nerve to say a person should stop whining(in which you spelled wrong) about a debt that is unpaid, when someone in return comes after them for repayment. Time always plays the factor when debt is concerned. It's not your debt and contracts are meant to be broken 90% of the time. Legalities influence the right for each individual to either settle or dispute their debt. Like yourself I'm a tax payer as well. Heads up, don't we also have a world debt needed to be resolved. That's a bigger challenge. Leave people alone. Let them handle he debt crisis. I'm sure debt is lying around with your name on it.

Uh, I have had people just walk into my house, steal all my stuff, trash my house, and the cops did nothing, not even an arrest, even when who did it was known...I never got one item or penny back. Cars stolen, don't get me started, and the cops won't look for them either (maybe if you are rich enough to have a car new enough and LoJack), I actually had to find a couple myself, then the cops step in so they can charge you $500 for nothing. I've had pension money messed with, robbed a million ways, and the credit card companies are just legal loansharks and con artists who set it up so you pay ten times what the item cost, and still never pay off your debt...but THEY get bailed out by the government when they want to send their bigwigs on fancy vacations and huge expense accounts when they have plenty of money they conned from America. So, it seems since you're so supportive of the banks, then we should follow in their example and let the government take care of us when we want a vacation, fancy clothes, houses, etc., or maybe just what people need to survive, like food, gas, bills, I think we'd settle for that.
Yes, I'm an accountant and I think you're nuts. There's a reason for bankruptcy, things happen, life gets bad, everything breaks all at once, and the average person CANNOT live on what we pay them, while we send jobs overseas and cut everything here, then Obama slaps everyone who isn't rich or lucky enough to have a good stable job with benefits across the face by not allowing people to work FT unless they have insurance which you can't get with PT hours at 99% of jobs, never mind be able to afford it outside of work assisted insurance. What an idiot!
So when you're busy bashing people for not paying bills, whether legal required to or not, what you should do is be helping people find work, helping to make jobs, teaching skills to kids so they can pay their bills rather than insulting those who cannot for reasons you don't know. If I was a lesser person, I'd wish on you a horrible accident that will put you out of work for life, and then while you're struggling to do simple things like get dressed or go to the bathroom or eat you can call me and tell me all about how easy it is to take care of a family (tho I'm guessing you don't have one or rarely see them), or even just yourself, on food stamps and disability, because you can't work ever again. I'm betting your credit card bills will be one of the first things you'll have to stop paying...followed by everything that's not a necessity...unless you're lucky enough to have a rich family that gives a crap.