True confessions time, and anonymous poll to follow shortly. Have you ever skipped out of paying a significant sum of money, defined as just not paying though you could have?
I’m ashamed to admit that long ago I skipped out on paying a couple of water and electricity bills when I relocated from one country to another, maybe amounting to US$300 in total. I could have paid, I know I should have paid, but I never got around to it. And since it was something like 10 years ago, I gather that it would have dropped off any credit report by now, and repaying it might dredge that ding on my credit back to life for another 7 years.
And BTW a general question: am I right on the above assumption? & if I moved back, what’s the worst that could happen?
And lest y’all think I’m a bad person, it happened as I was juggling an international move and I honest to God forgot about it until about a year later. Had a brief period where I was trying to track down how to pay it . . . and then it got lost in the shuffle again and again forgotten for several years (until today, actually).
Once or twice, though I don’t consider a few hundred dollars to be a significant sum to a utility or credit card co. My situation was similar to Koxinga’s though. The persons to be paid simply made it too difficult to pay them. They couldn’t find the accounts, then they weren’t sure who I should pay, then they wanted to play around with late fees after finally locating an account they had moved off the books years ago. It’s not worth it to pursue them.
My husband and I currently owe a taxi company £100, for taking us to and from the airport in May. They haven’t charged us, and we’ve rung and left a message on their voicemail letting them know they haven’t charged us. I don’t really feel inclined to pursue it any further, although if a bill arrives, I will of course pay it.
It wasn’t significant, but it was important: I forgot to renew my vehicle registration/license plate tags one year.
I honestly don’t really know what happened - I must have thrown out the notice or some such. (I’m pretty religious about paying my bills.) I was stopped at a stop sign when the nice police officer rolled down his window and motioned that I should do the same. “Your license plate isn’t current,” he said. “You should get that renewed.”
He was fully in his rights to pull me over and fine me - the plates were nearly two years out of date. I stopped by the DMV later that day and renewed the plates. I had to pay two years at once, but it was better than the alternative.
I try to be more aware of expiration dates on all of our vehicles, now. Funny thing is that I just paid the fee for my husband’s registration, but since the MN government is shut down, I’ve no idea when we’ll get the new stickers.
Not really that I can recall. I accidentally wore shoulder pads home from a store I worked at in the 80s which I never paid for, and I have a pan that was shipped to me in error and the company made it basically impossible for me to return it, but I don’t think I’ve ever received a bill that I didn’t pay.
I bought a pretty nice range when moving into a house in 1995. It ran about $3K.
I put a $1K downpayment on my debit card when I ordered it, and paid the remainder when it was installed in the house.
The $1K never went through. I called the place at least 2-3 times and told them about it, and they never did anything. Last time I contacted them was over a year later, and I called and said something along the lines of “I need to check and see if I have any remaining balance on my account with you.” They came back and said “no.” I haven’t worried about it since.
I once accidentally declared the wrong amount in my tax return for medical aid contributions which ended up getting me a decent tax refund. The next year, not much had changed in my income/etc so I expected around the same refund, but ended up owing a small amount. When I looked back over the two returns, the only real difference was in the amount claimed for medical aid.
Yeah. I was having a lot of financial difficulty and ended up filing bankruptcy, although if I really wanted to work out a budget/repayment plan deal with the debt collecting agencies I maybe could have. But I didn’t want to. I lumped in a bill from a towing company, including a buttload of storage fees, from when my car was towed and junked without notifying me first (I think the final bill scrub was like $5k, because the late fees didn’t stop accumulating). Because, fuck those unethical fuckers. I would rather have gone to debtor’s prison than pay that bill.
I won’t vote until the OP can answer whether short-selling a house when my ex-wife and I could have continued paying qualifies.
If not, my worst instance (and one I’m not proud of) would be when I managed to leave a Radio Shack having not paid $200 of the $220 I owed on a brand new 14.4bps modem. I was paying partially in cash and partially with a debit card. The cashier rung up the $20 on the debit card, then excused himself to get a bag for my box from the back. He came back with the bag, put the modem in it, handed it to me, and off I went.
Shortly after I walked out of the door, I realized I still had the $200 in cash, but I didn’t go back. I was 18 at the time and more than old enough to realize that my actions may have had severe consequences for the employee in question, not to mention the moral problems with basically stealing the modem. As I said, I’m not proud of that.
I filed bankruptcy in 2003, because I knew I was going to be divorcing my ex and I was worried because all of our household debt was for things he’d bought, but all in my name because he had bad credit. He’d run up $40,000 in unsecured debt in my name. I technically could have paid it off over a long long time, but I didn’t want to start anew saddled with all that debt. I feel guilty about it, but I don’t lose sleep.
It’s just that simple. People can put all kinds of rationalizations on it, but that’s the bottom line." He had it coming." “It was payback.” “Everybody does it.” “I won’t get caught.” “Somebody else screwed me so I’m getting mine.” “I’ll make up for it when I get rich.” “My family needed it.” “The money was not theirs anyway.”“Fill in the rest.”
I took a job cross country that paid me around $3000 for my moving expenses. I only had the job for 6 months before I got laid off since they sold that division of the business. A couple years later I found that the state I used to live in had unclaimed money for me. It was an accidental double-payment to me of my moving expenses. I kept the money since there was no company left to return the money to.
I “skipped out” on a medical bill…but not intentionally. I’m still not sure if I was really supposed to pay it or not.
I received a bill last November for ~$250 for a procedure done earlier that year March. I thought insurance had taken care of it until I got that bill. I kept meaning to do some research and call, but with the holidays, I put it off. In February, I called the hospital’s billing service and was told my account was clear. I tried to find out if insurance had paid or if they had written off the amount at year end. If figured if it was the latter, I should probably pay it anyway if I could. Eventually, I got tired of trying to figure it out and just gave up.
If you’re talking about “strategic default”, then yes, that’s actually one of the reasons I was interested in polling the populace here. Though I probably should have included a “$100,000 and up” option for that.
Maaaybe, but you realize that it’s a practice that companies and businesspeople engage in every day, right? Not only in terms of bankruptcy, but also strategically pressuring a partner, vendor or creditor. In certain circumstances, telling those parties that they’re not gonna get nothing but pennies on the dollar, take it or leave it, would be considered a sound tactic and prudent protection of one’s shareholders.
And let me ask you this. I’m guessing you’ve never been in really serious financial straits, but bear with me. Imagine that you were unemployed and couldn’t pay your credit card bill, and your credit card company charged off your account and sold it to a debt buyer for a penny on the dollar. Good news is you’ve found another job and are getting back on your feet. Bad news is, now this collection agent is calling you twenty times a day demanding you pay this amount in full. Do you feel morally obliged to pay this sleazy firm every penny you unquestionably owe?
That isn’t quite true in my case. The decision had nothing to do with the housing market. My wife and I were divorcing and knew it would be enormously burdensome for one of us to stay in a gigantic house that we’d just bought months earlier, and for the other to continue to pay part of the mortgage AND rent somewhere else. We requested a short-sale from the mortgage holder, explaining that we were divorcing, and we were told that we couldn’t qualify without having missed a payment. So, we missed a payment. And then the house was approved for a short sale.
We ended selling for about $30k less than what was owed on the property.
Never intentionally, but here is an odd story. An acquaintance’s wife was a travel agent, back in the days when they worked on commission. I used her, liked her and she was quite reliable. Then one day she became his ex-wife. No reason not to continue using her. Then one day I got a phone call from him and he asked if I had made such and such trip and made the reservation through his ex. Yes, I had. It seems she had put it on his credit card, not mine. Strange, but he called the CC company and told them the story. They eventually took if off his bill—but never charged it to me. I waited and waited and after a year I forgot about it.
Back in the 90s, my ISP forgot to bill me for about six months. I didn’t even notice until long after, and then they demanded the overdue money from me. I couldn’t afford to pay off such a large bill all at once, so fended them off with a partial payment. Then they collapsed into bankruptcy (no wonder if they weren’t sending out bills on time) and I moved to Australia, so I left still owing something like $250. Now they don’t exist, so I think I’m safe.