Our consumer culture entices, seduces, and encourages too many people to get too deeply in debt, instead of teaching them realistic spending habits and living-within-your-means.
People are actually ?rewarded? for getting deeper into debt, instead of learning to plan ahead, by having their credit limit increased.
If consumers become unable to pay their minimum payment, credit card creditors suddenly display their true heartless inhumane nature, and make it impossible to ever catch up with payments, by using irrational demands, pestering, punishing unilateral changes to the agreement, rate increases, extra fees, and other coercive measures.
Challenge:
The challenge is to decrease the practice of indentured servitude (aka the quicksand called ?good credit?), without unraveling society.
Goal:
The goal is to help teach young people to save first, then buy with real dollars, and not be seduced by the immediate buy now, pay later, quicksand.
Another goal is to propose some changes in the law to curb the excesses of debt collectors, and how we allow them to treat people who falter in their payments.
And to ask the members of the mass media to stop colluding in the brainwashing of the consumers to believe that paying payments forever is okay.
We have to stop saying that a good credit rating is a good thing. A good credit rating is a badge of slavery. Necessary perhaps in the beginning, until you have built up some equity in a home, have your first car, etc., but always indentured servitude.
Audience:
There are thousands of banks offering credit cards, on a one-sided, take it or leave it, basis, where the consumer really has little or no chance to object to the terms.
When the consumer becomes unable to pay the demanded minimum payment, the credit card lender
makes irrational demands, threats and punishing rate changes and extra fees, all designed to make it harder to ever pay it all. This comes at times when the consumer is least able to withstand negative influences.
Apparently, the slow-paying account becomes more valuable as a bad debt tax writeoff, and the case transforms into fulfilling laws to qualify as a tax writeoff, rather than seeking compromise to mitigate losses.
Is this defrauding the Treasury and the American taxpayers? Would politicians or tax collectors welcome a way to stop the massive bailout of consumer over-spending?
One group of consumer debtors is generally offered a limited version of unemployment/disability insurance, but only if a true wage serf, and only for up to 12 months, and only to pay the minimums, while encourging you to get into deeper and deeper total balances, and only if you pay the extra cost of the premiums. For all the ones who do not get laid off, or lose their ability to go to work, this insurance constitutes an extra interest charge.
People to engage in the dialoguing process are credit card lender quality management, IRS examiners who govern individual credit card lenders on their corporate tax returns, the Senate Banking Committee, the Federal Trade Commission, borrowers who have been forced into bankruptcy by harassing credit card creditors and their pestering services, Bankruptcy judges, teachers of all grade levels, and members of the mass media, especially television.
Some law library research, perhaps via the Internet, might be required to find the exact IRS regulation that might be influencing these heartless behaviors in credit card lenders. A letter to the Senate Banking Committee inquiring if they have any ready information on which IRS rules apply, that might be at fault, might be a good way to get them involved.
Extant data available include IRS records on individual credit card issuers, showing the percentage of bad debt writeoffs they are claiming, as opposed to their true losses on each account. A letter to a few IRS offices, inquiring about specific credit card banks returns, might get them involved.
The account balances should be recalculated to find the true delta, the difference between amounts paid out and payments made. The taxpayers should not be asked to pay the interest, and all the late charges and attorneys fees, and other extra addons to the balance.
Our present court structure is so overloaded that judges accept the computer-generated balances as the truth, when, in fairness to the taxpayers, judges should demand a recalculation of the account to find the true delta. Anything else is a false construct, and not a real monetary loss.
Ideal state:
An ideal culture would try harder to teach people to save or invest, and then to spend the increase, as opposed to brainwashing people to buy more than they can afford, just looking at the monthly payment.
And government, instead of colluding in the abusive practices, with only the option of filing for bankruptcy, as the antidote, would become as concerned about consumers learning how to save first, as they are about other social issues.
Families are increasingly required to have two parents bring home a paycheck, to carry their debt burden. Children are not getting the early education from mothers as much as they did formerly.
People are becoming too focused on having things, and forgetting to pay attention to having self-respect, integrity, being considerate, having good manners, and being mentally integrated.
Record numbers of consumers are filing for bankruptcy. The national debt is ballooning and the dollar is worth less. Domestic violence is on the increase. The stress of so many companies downsizing in a global economy, is leaving lots of families in economic uncertainty.
Legions of young people have lost faith in the system. An increasing number of citizens are getting involved in militia groups.
A main barrier will be to engage judges to order a recalculation of a true delta amount, instead of rubber- stamping the computer-generated balance. Judges do not have time to be accountants.
Some credit card creditors may be reluctant to stop gouging consumers, or to stop their dictatorial collection practices.
Changes in the law may be needed to mandate their compliance.
Lenders traditionally only concern themselves with renting their money, with little or no concern for the well-being of the borrower. To ask them to act in the best interest of the borrower, by investing a portion of the interest charged on an account, in a mutual fund of the person’s choice, with their name on it, to be released to them, when they have paid their credit account in full, will be a major change of consciousness level.
Provide a software program for judges, attorneys, collection agencies and credit card companies to easily recalculate the true delta on the account.
Provide software programs for credit card companies to use to act in the best interests of the consumer, as a financial advisor.
Give credit card companies nonprofit tax status, but only if they act in the best interests of the consumer, and are paid a percentage of increase that they truly assist with.
Propose to some credit card companies, that they act as trustees on a capitalization process, as a pilot project. with a client-centered approach, where the financial well-being of the consumer client is what matters, and the credit card company is providing accounting and fiduciary services, and is paid as a percentage of the increase in personal net worth of the client.
Instead of an additional amount being charged as interest, an additional amount will be charged, but will be invested for the client in a stable mutual fund of the client’s choice, and the base amount of the purchase, will immediately come out of the consumer client’s checking account. Instead of calling this a secured account, It is to be called a Zoom account.
With electronic banking, it will be a simple matter to set up the functions and make them automatic.
It would be a smart savings account, not saving dollars at a ridiculously low interest rate that the bank wants to offer, but the bank merely acting as a fiduciary agent for the consumer client, and investing it in the mutual fund of the client’s choice.
I think that it is time that this kind of account was offered, and that the consumers in America were told the truth about payments.
Any credit card bank corporation that would offer such a beneficial, rather than exploitive, program, should be given non-profit status, on these accounts, and not made to pay taxes on their fees.
As the financial health of our families improves, their need for government aid would decrease.
As the collection practices of our credit card corporations improves, they would not need to be subsidized by allowing tax writeoffs on virtual dollars that they never even had.