Even worse, if his wife initiates divorce proceedings, and then dies during the process, he could be in the unenviable position of having to dun himself for her share of his future earnings.
Or something. This is getting confusing. 
I’m not a hater but I’ll tackle it.
- Friends/relatives aren’t in the business of making loans.
- Friends/relatives don’t offset bad loans by charging higher interest to ALL those who borrow money.
- Friends/relatives don’t strong arm widows for a few bucks when that widow has higher needs for the money - like supporting her child.
- Bad loans are are a cost of doing business for CC companies. They expect a certain percentage to default. Traditionally that percentage is 1% higher than the unemployment rate. (don’t remember where I read that) - That’s why they charge 17.99 to 29.99% interest.
With a friend or a relative the moral obligation goes both ways. Just as you might feel morally compelled in some circumstances to repay a debt you didn’t legally owe to a friend or a relative, so that friend or relative might feel morally compelled to forgive a debt you DID legally owe under other circumstances.
For example, say the new widow legally owes her brother-in-law $5000 dollars. However the death of her husband has left her destitute – barely able to make the rent and keep food on the table. Wouldn’t you say that under those circumstances the brother-in-law has a moral obligation to, at the very least, postpone asking for repayment?
No such moral duty exists with the credit card company on either side. There is a contract that defines each side’s obligations. If the credit card company wanted the wife to be liable for the debt, they should have gotten it in writing.
IANAL, but my understanding is that the debts do not necessarily die - they are still owed by the estate, and should be paid out of the estate. Yes, I understand completely that the insurance payment is not part of the estate.
If you are contending that the death of a debtor automatically makes all unsecured debt null and void, I would like to see a cite.
Regards,
Shodan
IANAL either so I don’t know all the laws in question and how debts are settled after a death. However, it has been argued in this thread that even if the debt is not owed legally it is owed morally. Most of us understandably find that preposterous. If she isn’t on the hook fiscally she has no moral obligation to a credit card company that gambled and lost.
Even when the CCCo discharges the debt it doesn’t stop some fucking collection agency shitbag from hounding you with vicious personal attacks for 6+ months.
Even after you’ve sent them their requested copy of the death certificate and had the CCCo call and tell them that the debt was settled.
As my Mother and I discovered after my Father’s death. :mad:
CMC fnord!
The ironic part of this is that my Father was a fucking collection agency shitbag his entire, long, miserable life. Should’ve put the phone in his box of ashes* and made him deal with it. :smack:
*Which stayed at the funeral home for months because the life insurance policies that were supposed to pay for his death were declared invalid by the ICo because they didn’t have the same birth year on them … which curiously wasn’t a problem for all the years the premiums were being paid.
I was tempted to bow out of this discussion, since it’s clear that the Majority has ruled, but I thought I’d answer this.
I brought this example up because I was curious as to why most folks here think that it is reasonable for the financial equation in a marriage to be asymmetrical. I think that a marriage is a partnership - you know, “In sickness and in health, in good times and in bad.” If one believes that both partners share in the financial rewards of the other, than why is it so ridiculous to think that they should share in the debts, too?
People have been going on and on about how this was the husband’s “personal” debt. Well, when my wife goes to work, I don’t go with her - does this mean that I’m not entitled to share in her “personal” income?
I would also like to reiterate that my view, while in the clear minority here, is the actual law in Arizona and other states:
So I may be a douchbag and a turdwaffle (mmmm… waffles), but I’m not completely alone in my thinking.
Finally, I am not unsympathetic to the wife’s situation. The fact that I believe she has a moral obligation to pay her husband’s debt does not mean that I think she should put this obligation before those to her family. My opinion also should not be construed as supporting the credit card company and their obnoxious methods. I think they are a bunch of bastards, but that doesn’t change my opinion on shared debt.
Your wife’s income is a community asset, therefore you share in it. Income from her separate property (a rental, trust account, etc) would be her separate property,and you’d have no claim to it as long as she held it separate from the community assets. At least that’s how it is in my state.
I can’t believe I just read that whole thing.
Jesus fuck, man-- people continue to give you shit because you continue to move the goalposts back and forth as it fits you. Again you’ve brought up the law when you very clearly stated earlier in post #62:
in a quite exasperated manner, after it was you who quoted the law at the beginning of this thread in post #2.
And the asymmetry is irrelevant here. Marriage and the partnership that goes with it ends with death.
It’s not, but death did them part, which is also a common element of marriage vows.
When I started reading the original thread I though most of the responses would be more in line with beowulff’s.
As for the more recent discussion about the loan to a friend. If some destitute widow owed me a few thousand that I’d loaned her husband, I’d certainly still expect her to pay. Just not now. Heck, she might never be able to, or I may never feel it appropriate to collect, but she’d still owe it to me.
And I don’t see mentioning Arizona’s laws for context as “moving goalposts”.
But they ARE already getting paid – out of his estate, if I understand it correctly. However, the greedy bastards want to go after his life insurance policy as well.
And beowulff, this may shock you, but some people like separate finances. It’s not always “what’s mine is your’s,” etc. That’s the kind of shit that lead to women being viewed as property. She’s an individual, as was her husband – they’re perfectly entitled to have separate funds, credit cards, etc.
I only read page 1. I was mildly amused that both posters that I engaged on page 1 are now banned. (I don’t think I was a mod then. 
)
Beowulff, I think that when one is looking at contract disputes, one needs to recognize that as long as both parties go into the deal knowing what the potential outcomes could be, both parties had the opportunity to draft terms in the deal to cover those potential outcomes, and neither party was being pressured into the deal by the other party, then neither side should be chastised for relying on the terms of the deal, for the morality was addressed in the negotiating of the deal.
The jurisdiction’s law and the terms of the contract apply whether or not the state is communal property or non-communal property. Before signing the deal, each side can determine what it rights and obligation will be, and act accordingly. For example, the creditor could address the dead debtor issue in a number of ways, ranging from securing the debt against property, to insisting on a co-signer, to insuring the debt, to simply raising rates based on the risk of the debtor. The creditor had the opportunity to think these options through, and decided to make a contract based on its decision. It would not be “moral” for the creditor to expect that debtor to not rely on the terms of the contract.
As far as “gaming the system” and a “lottery mentality" go, consider the role of insurance, and then apply the concept of insurance and self-insurance to debt. Is it reasonable for a person to carry life and disability insurance to keep his family afloat if he is struck down? Is it reasonable for a person to carry mortgage insurance to keep his family housed if he is struck down? Is reasonable for a person to pay a bit extra to have a term in the secured mortgage contract that pays off the mortgage to keep the family housed if the he is struck down? Is it reasonable for a person to pay a bit extra to have a term in an unsecured loan that pays off the loan to keep the family housed if he is stuck down? I suggest that all these are reasonable, but nonetheless, all these are gaming the system.
When credit card companies extend credit, they know full well what the laws and the terms are, and they charge rates accordingly. In non-communal property states, they know full well that they can execute against the creditor or the creditor’s estate, but they cannot execute against people to whom the creditor made gifts. Knowing this, they make a very conscious choice as to whether or not to require security or a co-signer, and they set their rates accordingly.
Let’s look at it another way. Let’s say you have a job, and you get paid for your labour. As is typical for most businesses, your employer has an operating line of credit to cover payroll, there is a mortgage on the building in which you work, and there are liens secured against the machinery that you use. The company hits hard times through no fault of its own, resulting in you being laid off and the company going bankrupt. Morally, should you pay part of the company’s debt to its creditors? After all, you are the one who received the benefit derived from the company’s creditors. Somehow I doubt that you would think that there is a moral responsibility for you to bail out the company’s creditors, yet that is the sort of thing that you are pushing for when you say that there is a moral obligation for a wife to bail out her late husband’s creditors because she received the benefit of those debts.
One of the biggest reasons that only a fifth of the US states are communal property states is that there is something profoundly unfair when a spouse is expected to be held responsible for when the other spouse goes off the rails. When a husband drinks or gambles or spends himself into financial oblivion, it is not reasonable to expect the wife to pay off his debts that she did not even know he had. Since it is usually impossible to determine what value may have been passed from the debts to the wife, and of that, how much of the value remains, the various state governments have established bright line laws, setting our a distinction between communal property and non-communal property states, and for the most part, they have chosen to be non-communal property states. With such bright line distinctions in place, all parties to contracts are able to decide for themselves what terms are necessary to meet the various possible outcomes, so that no one is left morally out in the cold regardless of the outcome. A creditor in a non-communal property state can raise rates to cover bad debts. A debtor in a communal property state can purchase insurance to protect his spouse when he tanks. Either way, morality is not an issue, for the rights and responsibilities of the parties are properly negotiated prior to forming the contract, and the bad debt costs are built into the system that is based on the laws and the terms of the contracts that are negotiated.
As far as the analogy goes in saying that there is a moral debt owed to a credit card company the way there is a moral debt owed to a realative, I have to say that in all my years as a family lawyer, I have never, not even once, come across a person married to a credit card company. Usually, people marry other people. Sometimes they marry animals. Occasionally they marry inanimate objects. But credit card companies? Never.
No, and neither is Beowulff.
But here’s the thing, if your wife played computer poker or slipped out for lunch at a casino a couple of times a week without your having an inkling of her doing so, and in the process ran up a hundred grand in various credit card debts and debts to loan sharks, of which you had no inkling, would you still feel an obligation to pay her debt back?
I regularly come across people who one way or another drive themselves into financial oblivion without their spouses knowing or having been in positions to reasonably be expected to have known. I also regularly come across spouses who do know, but do not receive any benefit at all from the deadbeats that they are married to, and do everything they can to get their spouses to stop descending into financial ruin. What is the one thing in common? In each and every case right up until bankruptcy, the credit card companies kept extending credit at very high levels.
Nope. A better analogy is that the credit card company lets people pay it to thow bricks over their shoulders at the credit card company’s property. Occasionally, a brick will go through a window, and the credit card company will pay for it out of a small part of the money it took from all those people who paid to toss bricks. Morality simply does not come into it. It’s straight contract law.
Come to think of it, that would make a pretty good carnival game. Who here would pay a buck at the fair to have a shot at busting out a credit card company’s window?
What I see is that beowulff is focusing on the morality in one specific instance, but refusing to look at it as a whole. The actions of the credit card company are wholely important to this discussion. Any moral obligation on paying a debt you don’t legally owe is based on whether the person you owe it to deserves it.
If I was married, and my wife died owing money, I might pay it back. But if I was having horrible financial difficulties, and you came and tried to trick me into giving you money, then I would believe you forfeited the right to the money. Especially if you were already getting the money back from my wife’s estate.
I don’t give a shit about communal property. The only way it factors into the equation is that the fact that it is not the norm means it is not the moral majority.
I mean, Arizona has that stupid immigrant law that most of us think is immoral. Does the fact that it’s in the law make it moral for you, beowulff?
Marriage is two people who love each other enough that they want to spend the rest of their lives together, and, as a token of that pledge, they add legal difficulties if they want to separate. The property-based system only makes sense in the old patriarchal system, where joining property was the purpose of marriage.
If marriage meant that what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine, then it would be impossible to rape or abuse your spouse. Because you would belong to one another, it would be your property to abuse.
Communal property regimes and non-communal property regimes usually end up with somewhat similar results vis a vis separating couples, in that under the communal property regimes, the jointly owned assets get split, wheras under the the non-communal property regime, the value of the assets get split, so either way, there is a split.
In a messy divorce, it costs separating couples who are in property disputes more than couples who are in equalization disputes due to the entitlement issues. In other words, folks who divorce in communal property states who want to fight over property can expect to have longer and more expensive fights than those in non-communal property states.