Do You Feel Bad For Victims of Financial Exploitation?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

There is a difference between outright fraud and legally allowing someone to get into financial trouble through their own stupidity. It really comes down to misrepresenting the services you offer. For example, if I offer you a low-interest loan that clearly has a huge baloon payment at the end of it, is that wrong? You know the terms of the loan. Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme that would inevitably collapse.

Many of these “wealthy and educated” millionares are clueless imbeciles living off the interest of inhereted money. They don’t know any more about accounting and finance than the poor folk who get into financial trouble. The only difference is that those fools have more money to be parted from.

The fact is that when someone is offering to make you an offer that’s too good to be true, it probably is. People will always allow greed to trump common sense.

They should replace Home Economics and Woodshop and other bullshit classes and replace them with a “How to Live in the World” class. What the heck do kids need to know how to bake a pie or operate a band saw for? They should be learning about balancing a check book, renting an appartment, applying for a loan or mortgage, and why you probably aren’t going to see that Nigerian prince’s money.

62

Do you get the feeling that many of Madoff’s victims knew that they were getting involved with a shady deal, but figured they would be the ones doing the scamming (and people did make a lot of money off the Ponzi, just not the ones who got in late and didn’t get out)?

I had a hard time feeling bad for the Madoff victims.

63

Yes, Msmith, I get your point but baking a pie or fixing something wood will come up in life, but never will you need Moby Dick, Silas Marner, and who was who in the 1700’s, that part of English and history can go and make way for living in the world classes. Cooking is a useful skill in life and remember it can be a job too. In parts of the country like the SE woodworking can sure get you a job making furniture. We spent a week on the damn pony express and it was a failure, it was dropped in 2 years.

The only use for the worthless novels they have one read and write reports on is for teaching the same crap over again. Make that kind of stuff the electives, those who want poetry and fiction could still read and report on it as an elective, while I’d like to read about how G.E. or IBM started and about Babbage and the birth of computers, that is usually NEVER even covered in history class.

Study useful things, they are also interesting where you will never be hunting white whales at sea. I’d love to know who invented the florescent light and the mercury/sodium light, but all that is ever mentioned is Edison’s and Ford and Eli Whitney when I was in school. Yes they are worth study for sure but so are many others. Who invented the integrated circuit? That is as important a thing as what Ford did.

64

Actually here’s a pretty good article that talks about it.

65

Maybe not buy DVDs? I don’t waste money on them when the library loans them out for free.

66

I used “running up credit card debt” as an example. I don’t currently have a credit card (by choice…my credit union and everyone else keeps offering me one(s)). Many people who struggle with making ends meet do, however, rely on credit cards and very often run up debt instead of paying it off immediately because it’s possible to do so…can get one into a lot of trouble.

I have a bank account (credit union, actually) but they don’t issue such small loans…the minimum is 5 grand, I believe, and given my current situation of being a FT student on SS, not employed, I doubt they’d be too excited about issuing me one anyway. Which is fine, because I don’t WANT one…I just sometimes need a hundred or 2 for a few weeks, and $26 is, to me, a perfectly reasonable fee for that service. Yes, it IS a “high rate” of interest, but only if calculated out over a year.

I paid off my car last year, about a yr. early, to save on interest and not have that payment going forward. Soon after, the finance company offered me a $5,000 personal loan. I considered it, thinking, hmm, I could just have it in reserve to use from as needed so I wouldn’t need to plug the gaps every 3 mths or so between student funding infusions, but I almost laughed in their faces when I discovered the interest rate AND the early pay-off penalty! No thanks. Taking out a small, short-term loan as needed saves me THOUSANDS over that alternative.

There IS a method to my madness, believe it or not. :stuck_out_tongue:

67

First, almost all of my DVDS are purchased from the pawn shop for $3 or $4.

Second, a great many of them were purchased BEFORE I went back to school…I also have thousands of books, but haven’t bought a new one in years (thrift stores, yard sales, library sales).

Third, I am a Film Major…I own a lot of movies. I also have a Netflix subscription I literally could NOT survive without and which saves me a great deal of trouble and funds tracking down and/or renting or purchasing required films for school. Bite me. :wink:

Fourth, the sort of micromanaging of another’s personal finances you’re engaging in is offensive. Exactly the same attitude expressed when people argue for eliminating payday loans to protect the ignorant, financially irresponsible poor from themselves. :rolleyes:

68

I have an Aaton and some lights. You know, just in case you want to make a film sometime. :wink:

69

I’ll bear that in mind. :smiley: I get handed cards and contact info from people all the time (actors, screenwriters, camera, sound, lighting, etc…folks) and I save them all…just got asked the other day by a classmate if I knew a good sound person for some no-budget cable show he and some others are putting together next summer. Turns out, I DID, having happened to meet a guy while working for the Dept. of Transportation a few summers ago and it turned out he’d done the sound for a low-budget indie I’d recently seen (small world, to say the least…he couldn’t believe I’d SEEN it :p)

Can never have too many contacts, imo. :slight_smile:

70

No offense was intended.
It is just that I have supported a family of six on one factory job. The things we did without are bought by people I know who complain about living paycheck to paycheck. If you are broke, in my world, no cable, no cell, no game system, no big screen, no designer clothes, no trips, no CDs,no DVDs, etc.
I was poor, now I am not.
I agree in your case DVDs are needed.

71

Fair enough. Rest assured, we have 2 t.v.s and one is 17 yrs old. The other about 7. We have cell phones, but we piggy-back on my nephew’s plan and pay only $5 a mnth for each line (calls to one another or others on the plan are free, as are texts)…cell phones are a MUST, imo. When I’m on campus I HAVE to be reachable by my kids.

I cancelled the cable last year…we have Netflix. I bought a Wii at the pawn shop so we could watch it on the T.V.

We have internet. Another must. But I switched providers to save money when I ditched the cable.

We shop thrift stores for clothes.

Usually make it from payday to payday, but this time I had to buy new tires for the car, which resulted in (no surprise) my student funding cushion being depleted a bit early. Oh well, beats skidding off the icy road or getting a blowout on the freeway.

I actually don’t typically use the word “poor” to describe myself…I see that more as signifying some permanent state of affairs as opposed to a temporary decline in income. I am a bit “cash challenged” at the moment, but all for a good cause and soon enough remedied. :slight_smile:

72

Sadly, my daughter hasn’t got the best financial sense. A few years ago, she decided to buy a car. I spoke to her, and tried to talk her out of buying a new car-I pointed out that a good used car (that we could buy for cash) would have lower insurance costs, lower txes, and NO monthly payments for 4 years.
Like a good father, I found a nice car (from a Saturn salesman friend of mine) and told her about it-it was a nice low mielage car…but she didn’t like it (too ugly). So, she wound up paying >$4500 in interest to get her car.
Unfortunately, she is prey for any sharp sales guy who come s along.

73

I have mixed feelings. I have a strong libertarian streak, but at the same time, I have a gut feeling that society should not be a no-rules free-for-all. I haven’t read The Jungle, but from the Wikipedia synopsis I think I have a sense of why Lewis named it so: it’s the idea of society as a jungle in which the strong prey on the weak by every means possible, legal and not. Not just the strong taking advantage of their inherent position of power, but also the smart preying on the predictably bad decisions of the dumb.

Is civilization supposed to be a jungle?

OTOH…

On the evening news over the past few years I keep hearing sob stories from people who lost their homes - not because they lost their jobs, but because they took out an ARM in which the payment jumped to a level they couldn’t afford, and they were unable to refi because their property value had plummeted. I want to punch these people: WTF were you thinking, taking a loan that was going to reset to impossibly high payments? You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.

Likewise, in the case of Bernie Madoff (and to clarify, this was not a case of exploitation; it was out-and-out fraud), I want to punch the victims who trusted ALL of their money - 100% of their lifelong nest egg - to one single man. Yes, Madoff deserves to hang by his balls for the rest of his life, but his victims, having apparently never heard the maxim “don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” don’t score too many point with me.

I have sympathy for victims who have attempted to exercise a sense of self-preservation. A guy who looks both ways before crossing the street and still gets nailed by a drunk driver is a true victim; a moron who is listening to his iPod while he sends a text message and wanders onto a busy street bears far more responsibility for whatever happens to him.

Having said all that, there are some people far down on the IQ scale who are doing their best to operate at the limit of their intellect, and that’s all they can be asked to do. These folks, frustrating as their self-defeating behavior is, are the ones who need help. maybe less from regulating businesses, but insteady by offering free classes on financial management, explaining things that their parents and/or high school didn’t teach them: how to manage a checkbook, how to manage a credit card, why payday loans should be avoided as much as possible, and so on. One of the hallmarks of low IQ is poor impulse control, so you will still end up with folks who get a payday loan to buy a new car stereo, but the less this sort of thing happens, the better.

74

There is a UK company which specialises in offering small loans over short periods (up to 28 days IIRC). All their advertising, including their website, contains very large print saying TYPICAL APR 2689% (no, that’s not missing a decimal point). Which, if you’re borrowing £70 for a week, may be quite reasonable to you.

What the UK financial regulations require is not that the interest be capped or that such companies be banned, but rather that the real costs or risks of using the company are clear and understandable to the average customer (i.e. someone who isn’t a financial professional). It’s not about saving people from themselves; it’s about making sure people understand what they’re agreeing to. If they still want to go ahead, fine, but no one goes bankrupt just because the real interest rate was buried in the small print or couched in confusing terms.

75

I already said, half my team; most of the other half of the team happens to be people who already lived in this town. It’s not paid from per diem, but from their own salaries - but out of some two dozen non-locals I know who work here (and whose hotels are not covered by the employer), there’s only myself and one other who bothered find flats and do their own cooking and cleaning. The cost of my flat is equivalent to what any of my coworkers pays for four nights in the crappy hotels they’re using.

Most of these people have an owned/rented home they go to every weekend, but not all. The most extreme case I’ve known lived in the same hotel for over a year and a half.

There used to be a type of hotels called “hotel residencia”, specifically geared towards people living there; they’re not so much geared towards permanent guests, but many “aparthoteles” do accept permanent guests; the rates are quite a lot higher than for a comparable-size flat, but if you’re looking at a stay below a year, you may have problems getting a rental. I’ve seen rental “sericed apartments” with pricing schemes that put them in the aparthoteles box in other countries, including Austria, Italy and the UK (different prices per day, per week, per month, per month if stay is 6mo+).

On loan explanations: they get explained, my ass. They probably get explained like the loan I got for my US-bought car got explained before I started asking questions: I thought the salesman was going to crap his pants when I asked about “cancellation fees” and suchlike. One of my scariest traits (as seen in several countries) is the strange custom of reading contracts completely before I sign. Most people don’t go beyond “initial, initial, initial, sign”.

76

I remember 25 years ago in law school one smart aleck defined capitalism along the lines of the right of every individual to try to take advantage of every one else. Not sure it is entirely off base.

77

Please don’t take offense, but this was one of the things I learned to budget for early in life. You KNOW that your vehicle will need maintenance, so budget for it. You KNOW that some idiotic random thing in your life will break, some fee will have to be paid, or some tax will be due.

It is easy to overlook them because they don’t happen every month, but if you budget for those and then they aren’t “surprises.”

78

Fools and their money are soon parted. It’s both exploitation AND a legitimate business as far as I’m concerned.

If someone in the modern age isn’t willing to educate themselves I don’t hold any sympathy when they’re tapped out.