I’m sorry, I’m completely familiar with financial problems, and the woe of repossession - I’ve had it happen to me. But if you’ve got 10K worth of shit in your car, and are 3 months behind in your car payments, I gotta say your priorities are in the wrong place. Granted, some of the stuff was work computers, according to them, but I have a hard time believing that they could possibly amount to more than an extremely generous 5 grand.
You don’t pay your car payment, and your car gets repossessed, I’m sorry, the Christmas gifts are gone. Who uses a car as storage for that stuff anyway? It’s not like they didn’t know they were in danger of having it taken.
Well, not that I don’t smell fraud on the wind, but here goes. If there was, indeed property in the vehicle at the time it was re-possesed, then by law it ALL has to be turned back over to the people who had the vehicle taken away IIRC, though IANAL so it may not be.
I agree with the OP, some messed-up priorities right there. A nice thing to give your family for Christmas is a vehicle to ride in.
I’ve <cough> heard that they give you a period of time in which to go to where you car is and get your stuff out. I’m not feeling alot of sympathy for this family. I did, however, get a chuckle out of her saying “We asked them FOUR times…!” What, they still took it after being asked FOUR times not to! Shocking!
Why do I always give people the benefit of the doubt?
A couple of laptops, a CD wallet of software, a stack of tech books, and the random assortment of crap that piles up around a busy family could maybe push the limit. Stupid stuff can cost a lot of money- I’ve got a pair of $800.00 rollers skates leftover from when I was about thirteen in my trunk. Unfotunately, nobody wants to buy a ten year old pair of smelly heavily used skates made with ancient technology. The christmas presents may amount to little, but without those the story wouldn’t be news.
What I don’t get is why they had all this stuff in the car. I get uncomfortable when I leave my cell phone hidden under the seat while I run to grab the take-out order. It’s six worlds of stupid to keep a laptop or anything else even vaguley important to you in your car. At some point, your car most likely will get broken in to, and that little lever in the front seat makes it pretty darn easy to get in the trunk. Every year someone in my film program gets their camera stolen because they left it in the trunk and hopped out to pay for their gas or stopped by a friends house for a few minutes. You must assume that if it is in your car, it is as safe as if you left it on the street.
This should have served a a lesson to that woman to not get three months behind in the car payments, but instead she will probably just continue to blame everyone but herself for this.
If you are that far behind, expect the vehicle to get repossessed. If she’s lying about all the stuff in it, she’s a damn fraudster and I hope she gets smacked down. If she was just stupid enough to leave a bunch of Christmas presents in the back of a van that she knew was behind in payments and probably going to get repo’d, she shouldn’t have done that. I don’t see how this is the repo company’s fault.
They stole her stuff. Where does it say anywhere that they are entitled to the $10,000 worth of goods in response to a 3 month back payment which maybe tops $500 total?
And they said it was their ‘traveling office’ so $10,000 worth of electronics is feasable. I sometimes wonder why I still post on this board.
This happened to me once.
I had a bank account that payments for my van were to be automatically deducted from on the day they were due. I didn’t use this account for anything else. One month I deposited the cash the day it was due. However they tried to make the payment already and it didn’t go through. So they simply stopped deducting the payments and didn’t tell me. Later, when I was in the process of moving and I had all of my stuff in the van, my van was stolen. Well, not stolen, it was repossessed. After figuring it all out and taking the money from the bank and paying off the dealer I got my van back. There were a few items missing and everyone from the tow company to the dealer that ordered the tow company to the cops all just shrugged their shoulders and said, “Can you prove that stuff was in there?” and all of them had this attitude that since I missed my car payments that I was a bad person and deserved to what happened to me.
Three months’ payment on a van that is worth anything can easily top $1000. Especially if this person had lousy credit at the time of purchase, unfortunately.
She can get her stuff back. Period. All she has to do is call the towing company and make an appointment to pick it up. The only stuff you can’t get back are things you’re not supposed to have in the first place (drugs, illegal weapons). Of course, if they had bothered to report this, it wouldn’t be “newsworthy” would it?
Y’know, if the payments on your transportation to your job are behind, you have no business spending even hundreds of dollars on Christmas. You need a way to your job way more than your kid needs a cel phone…and Xmas comes on the SAME DAMN DAY every year. It’s not like it sneaks up on us, folks!
You’d be amazed at the shit people leave in their cars. Wallets, cash, valuables, checkbooks, and my personal favorite: vital medication! :smack:
Maybe they live in a walkable city, and the car isn’t really that important to their day-to-day lives. Maybe it’s broken anyway and needs repairs they can’t afford. Maybe they have access to another form of transportation.
Maybe the kids just lost their favorite grandparents and couldn’t handle not having christmas. Maybe the presents were school clothes and new blankets since they can’t afford to heat the house anymore. Maybe they were donated by charity or by a relative. Maybe the parents sold the kids’ playstations and horses and other favorite things and were getting a supply of simple toys. Maybe the gifts were a selection of books the kids always check out at the library so that the parents don’t have to worry about overdue fees on those titles. Maybe last year they saw trouble coming so they saved half the already-bought presents for this year. Maybe the parents truely thought they could make their way out of this and the kids wouldn’t have to ever pay for their financial mistakes.
She never complained about losing her car. She was upset to lose stuff she HAD payed for in her car. It’s dumb dumb dumb to leave anything in your car, but it’s also dumb to assume you know more about people’s lives than they do. Being in a bad financial situation does not give all the world the right to go over your every decision with a checklist and judge you on it.
It also doesn’t give you the right to go whining to the media because the big bad repo company took your car when you owed money on it, and were using the car as storage.
I don’t know if you were asking me or not but no there were no calls, letters, no collection agency calls.
I had gone through a bankruptcy and the special account for automatic deducted payments was part of that settlement. So, that, for some reason is why they didn’t need to call or anything like that. I would think that if a bank called and said, pay us by tomorrow or we’ll repo your car, the car would suddenly become very hard to find.
Well despite the fact that I’m the OP, I have to disagree with this point. There are many things that can happen to cause such things - as I’ve said, I’ve had it happen to me (bill collectors, bankruptcy and repo men).
My point is, I knew I was behind in my payments, and I knew it was going to get repossessed, and I made a point of not leaving anything in there of any value, knowing that one day I would wake up and it would be gone.
Well, I guess that was smart, not leaving things in the car if you knew it might be repo’d. Question is, though, why did you buy a car you couldn’t afford in the first place?
Because I could afford it when I bought it. Seriously, I’m thrilled for you if you’ve never been in a position where your financial situation took an unpredictable, and unstoppable turn for the worse. But the fact is, not everyone is so lucky, and there is only so much you can do to protect yourself.
$10k in clothes/blankets/books/simple toys? If you’re in a situation where you can’t afford heat in your house, don’t you think it would be more efficient to teach the kids responsibility in returning library books on time rather than buying them? No one is giving this woman shit for being in a financially tight situation, they’re giving her shit for being a moron reaching for sympathy when she doesn’t deserve it.
