Title : Widows and Orphans
link : Widows and Orphans
Widows and Orphans
Some days the insanity of the credit industry hits me harder than others.
I have a friend who lost her spouse in a war nearly 40 years ago.
She was a young girl with a child, and she had no choice but to work through all the pain and tears to take care of her family. She describes it all now with a certain detached matter of factness that makes me marvel how anyone could ever be so tough.
As the years went by she used credit cards to supplement whatever income she could generate. She does not appear to have lived extravagantly. She always intended to pay the debts back. She did whatever she had to do to help her family survive.
She came to me deeply embarrassed. She was making minimum payments on over 30,000 in credit card debt, had been for a long time, but was falling behind. She felt she was about to go under. Paying her bills was a matter of pride. With all she had been through she was being told she had to consider bankruptcy. She was distraught.
If the credit card issuers had been willing to lower the rate and stretch payments out over five years, she could probably have paid them and would have been happy to do so.
Her efforts to negotiate over the phone failed, and calls from collection agencies started in earnest, with the phone ringing from morning to night.
That was over two years ago.
Her case has not been a model of a successful turnaround but it has in fact been fairly representative of how these things work.
She hired us. We notified her creditors in writing to deal with us. The calls to her home stopped.
We talked to her creditors and asked for deals. We got a few settlements, defended a lawsuit for her, and in time we'll work out some more.
In this morning's mail I received a letter to her, c/o our firm as her attorneys.
It begins as follows...
"Dear__________: You have been pre-approved for a Platinum Visa card with a credit limit up to $1,500.00......"
On the back of the letter, it quotes a rate of 23.9%, and adds cash advance transaction fees, minimum finance charges, late payment fees, over limit fees, closed account maintenance fee.
This fact pattern, astonishingly, repeats itself every day.
Thus the article Widows and Orphans
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