CSotD: Wealth Management … theirs, not yours
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Joe Martin's Mr. Boffo is one of several cartoons he does, each a different expression of a very funny world view combined with a talent for build-ups to punchlines like this. The unifying principle is the bland assurance that the speaker is perfectly sane and normal. Even when it's predictable, it's funny.
And I'll admit I didn't see this one coming.
It cracked me up particularly since I was a consumer reporter for several years as part of my business coverage, and, while I succeeded in hauling up several corporate miscreants by the napes of their necks over the years, I was also guilty of passing on the corporate bushwa advice that, if you found yourself in over your head, you could just call the credit card company and they would work something out with you.
Then I was unemployed for nearly a year and found out that you still need the gun.
First of all, they won't talk to you at all until you are seriously in default. Despite what their public relations people say, you can't call them up and tell them that, after this payment, you're going to be tapped out. They don't care if you can make the next payment. They just care about the last one. So you have to stop paying them for a couple of months before they'll even discuss the idea of changing terms.
But they still won't. They don't need to.
They have a system that doesn't require them to negotiate anything: If they feel you might default, they simply set your interest rate high enough that you'll have paid off your principle, plus given them some profit, before you go under.
Think about it: They've got the system set up such that they can send out those "cash advance checks" willy-nilly and not worry about how many of them get stolen and fraudulently cashed. I've interviewed people who had those checks swiped from their mailboxes and, in each case, written for thousands of dollars and tens of thousands of dollars, that the credit card company will never see again.
They make enough profit from the people who do fill them out honestly that they can shrug off the millions they lose to scam artists. Not getting paid back is written into their business model.
So, by the time you're in trouble, you still owe them plenty of money, but only because you agreed to the terms, not because they're in the hole. You're nothing but profit from there on out. And, while they could afford to lower your rates, lower your payments and let you pay it off over a longer period, they can also afford to tell you to pound sand.
Which they will do, hoping you'll decide to stop taking the baby in for all that expensive dialysis so you can continue to pay 28 percent on your credit cards, and knowing that, if you don't, they've already pretty much wrung you dry anyway. It's not worth setting a bad precedent.
I'm not talking theory.
As part of personal bankruptcy, you have to go through a financial counseling process, which, for a fee, you can do on-line. As part of that, you put in all your financial data, including income and outgo, and then, when they have your total credit payments per month, they check to see what your negotiated payments could be, and you have the option of accepting that new, lower, negotiated payment plan or following through with the bankruptcy.
The offer they gave me was three percent.
No, no, not that I could pay everything off at three percent interest rate. And, no, they weren't going to lower my interest rates by three percent, either.
They would lower my monthly payments by three percent. Instead of a buck, I could give them 97 cents. Only it wasn't a buck.
I still needed the gun.
I might feel embarrassed by disclosing how much I know about this stuff now, but, in the current economy, I know I'm not alone. If everyone who has been through this was wearing a red striped shirt, you'd never find the one named Waldo.
It's an epidemic, and you can laugh, or you can get angry. I prefer to do both.
If you want a laugh, read Joe Martin.
If you don't want to laugh, check out "Inside Job," a documentary on how the financial industry managed to tank the economy. Netflix doesn't offer it for streaming, but it's very much worth getting the disk.
Joe Martin is funnier, but the logic remains the same. And, as Rick Blaine would put it, it has "A wow finish. A guy standing on a station platform in the rain with a comical look on his face because his insides had been kicked out."
Only in this one, she left him for Major Strasser, not Victor Laszlo.
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