You're basically dropping you bloody name to a pool of sharks who have little respect for what is legal or ethical.

If any debt collector is brave enough to do any of this I'm documenting all of it and suing the everloving pants off of them. Because that is harassment.

Just document all calls, save all letters, and get a good grasp of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and any state-level equivalent (Rosenthal in CA) -- in CA you get to shoot the violators with a double barrel for federal AND state violations.

Having the major credit card companies increase my APR to 30% in 2009 having never missed a payment on anything in my life, while being backstopped via TARP and having literal 0% Fed/interbank lending rates blew my top off and I decided giving them the finger was my individual right of protest and damn the consequences. Little did I know I was entering an exciting world of learning how to beat the bottom feeders at their own game. Never paid a dime, made about $20k suing for violations, and my credit score was above 700 within 4 years and after everything fell off (7 years) it's like it never happened. But I'll never forget it - was pretty damn exciting to be honest.

It's basically trying to get them to trip up and make a mistake - and it blew my mind how often and unabashedly these collection agencies would! Hell even BofA and Chase violated before they sold the debt off and I got an immediate removal from my report and the debt wiped away / no more collections (I was happy just to make things 'disappear' in these instances..didn't put money in my pocket but at the time is was a huge win, as one can imagine).

Yes, I've received things in the mail, which I simply threw into paper recycling. Eventually, these stopped as well.

A debt collector has yet to physically come to my home, however, having grown up in 1990s Russia, I'm prepared to take care of them in a swift, permanent, and legal way.

Could you elaborate on this? I don't know if it's what you intended but it just comes off like you defrauded a company.

They do it because, in most cases, it is not fraud - defaults are just a fact of business. Being a lender is not a ticket to free, zero-risk money.

Both parties in a lender/borrower transaction understand that there is a risk of default, as well as consequences for a default. In a secured loan, the borrower loses the secured item. In an unsecured loan, more of the risk falls to the lender (which is why unsecured loans have much higher interest rates.)

This is the advice I've heard given to people who are severely underwater on a mortgage, but the idea that you can get sick one time and be financially ruined is still astonishing to me.

I guess everywhere has some legislation that is just bonkers, though. I only just recently found out from a friend that you can't legally walk away from a mortgage here (UK) without declaring bankruptcy like you can in the States, which is bananas.

If I'm a bank, and you come to me for a $75k mortgage on a $100k house, the $25k down is my security. That should be the beginning and end of our transaction.

If you stop paying the mortgage, the bank gets the house. If the bank reasonably believed there was a chance of the house being worth less than the amount borrowed during the term, they shouldn't have made the deal.

It's a simple system that makes perfect sense. Holding people to account beyond the security, as they do in the UK, encourages predatory lending behaviours and is utterly unfair to the borrower.

In the occasion you stop paying, the bank will foreclose the house, but YOU are still liable for the rest of the loan. If you still don't pay, an official collection agency (not your bank, that would be a conflict of interest) will try to cut a deal, come and take your stuff and/or garnish your wages to pay of the loan. You can insure yourself against calamities like divorce and losing your job, for which the bank will give you a discount on the interest rate.

Mortgages are limited by what you can afford, so a predatory mortgage loan is practically an oxymoron.

Down payments are uncommon, especially for a first time buyer. The only money you need to bring with you is transaction costs (~5% : taxes, notary, financial advisor, etc.) and whatever you think you need for decorating.

I've tried to convince people for years that the biggest cause of the 2008 crash wasn't the banks, it was the rating agencies, but that's more complicated than people want to get with it.

It's a lot easier to just believe that "the system" is "rigged" and "out to get you".

In the UK, people should've known they couldn't repay their mortgage if they got in trouble, and it's why I continued renting until 2013.

In the US, I'd have happily bought a house with 0% down and no obligation if it goes against me.

FWIW I'm not aware of many people who come down with a cold and are financially ruined. The people I know who are in crippling medical debt have, for example, had both kidneys replaced. While I'm not happy they are in those circumstances, it's not hard to picture two replacement kidneys and all the other treatments involved as mind-bendingly expensive.

It seems worthwhile to distinguish, at least a little bit, severity when we are talking about this.

That's nuts in 2018 in a wealthy democracy.

Think about how cuba is able to have similar life expectancy, etc at a fraction of the cost with chronic shortages and subpar sanitation. Most likely there are many medical procedures doing at best nothing for the patient except draining their wallets.

Worse, it could be that treatment 1 for problem A causes problem B which leads to treatment 2, etc, etc for some moderate benefit at great cost over just dealing with problem A.

Worst, it could be the medical treatments are having a net negative effect on people's health. Eg, those studies that estimate hospital errors (not even just death from dangerous treatments applied as standard) are the third leading cause of death in the US.

I suspect most of the US' problems is the atrocious lifestyle most live; overeating and under-exercising are literally a lethal combination.

I would post a pubmed link but sorry, youll have to just try it yourself and read blogs because the medical researchers still haven't caught up to this. They are still calling a 30% carb diet "low carb".

Treating complex conditions (like cancer) is exactly where the US excels, compared to other countries. Yes, it's expensive, but the alternative is, well, dying.

Since the grandparent mentioned the UK specifically, I'll point out that the US has dramatically higher survival rates for treatable forms of cancer than the UK does. For prostate cancer - generally one of the most treatable forms of cancer, if treated properly - people in the US have over a 90% chance of survival[0]. The UK, on the other hand, has absolutely abysmal surival rates - second-worst of all OECD countries, and a mortality-to-incidence ratio that's almost twice what you see in the US.

Yes, the US could do a better job at making that top-of-the-line care accessible to more people, but even then, the baseline care for complex treatments specifically is actually much higher than what the UK provides.

[0] That's over the entire population, so it's including people who are uninsured and can't afford the most expensive treatments.

Perhaps there is a tradeoff between treatment of complex conditions, and treatment of more frequent but less complex conditions?

However I am specifically a proponent of voluntary collectives for things, as government forced cooperation seems suboptimal and fragile to me.

Isn't this the exact thing insurance solves, in particular catastrophic coverage insurance? Nobody really gets "ruined" by paying out of pocket for one X-ray and two aspirin.

The problem is that the insurance is so expensive some people can't afford it. But the only sense in which single payer would "fix" the high cost/overhead/waste problem is by de facto regulating prices, which can be done even without it but which has a lot of obvious problems -- if the regulator chooses too high a price then it's still wasteful/unaffordable but too low and there will be no providers (or the providers will sacrifice quality to hit the regulated price).

What we need is a real solution to cost disease, which probably has something to do with reducing the regulatory compliance costs so there will be less overhead and more viable competing providers, requiring price transparency from providers, and then having people pay out of pocket for all non-catastrophic care so the patient has the incentive to decline treatment or find a less expensive provider when the treatment is unnecessary or overpriced.

This is why there are regulations to ensure a minimum standard of care. Above that, the provider is the one who has to convince the patient that their service provides some benefit over the lowest cost provider.

And isn't voluntary collective healthcare just another way to describe private insurance companies, especially HMO's?

Chapter 7 bankruptcy (?) is probably the only way forward for most folks after a certain point.

I’m not sure what I’d do if I was presented with a $150k bill for snake bite. https://www.wideopencountry.com/actual-cost-rattlesnake-bite...

I’m fairly sure the US health system is broken, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/09/the-c...

The prices aren’t even related to cost of materials or time or even linked to inflation. Maybe patents or research costs are included, maybe not. It’s all a game between hospitals and financial companies.

Sort of like student loans...

This is a harmful myth. It's possible to get emergency care under pretty much any conditions. Everything else isn't available.

You can use this trick if you got hit by a truck or had a big infection. It doesn't work to get a hip replacement, or chemo, or post-stroke occupational therapy, or a prosthetic, or a pacemaker, or...

That stuff requires insurance. You need to stop telling your friends that fraud is the answer and start telling them to sign up for care.

Your point about "fraud" is just a nitpick over a moral vs. legal definition of the term, and it too isn't helping anyone live a happy life.

Get. Insurance.

She received care, without insurance, for heart failure(including oxygen concentrator and tanks), a pulmonary embolism, and back pains(among other things which I can't fully recall and am actively trying to forget).

I'm not saying it happens to everyone, but it does happen.

which is to say, preventative and maintenance care are important, and i don't see any of that in what you described. parent's talking about emergency care. you're describing emergency care.

I'll also say that people like her are why preventative care isn't always what it's cracked up to be. There are plenty of people like her with conditions like diabetes(which she also developed due to her sedentary lifestyle and poor eating habits) who willfully disregard their doctors' attempts at moderating their behaviors.

That is literally the opposite of what "preventative care" means.

Everything is emergency care, if you wait long enough.

Once they have a judgement they can garnish your wages and bank accounts. Other times they may just sell the debt to a debt collector and not even bother trying to collect themselves.

In other states, they can.

Rules and amounts vary by state, but it general, it protects you from creditors forcing you to sell your home. They may get some of the proceeds when you do eventually sell, so it may lock you into your location if you get a lien/judgement against you, but it's still better than getting kicked out.

Per usual, IANAL, consult a proper attny in your locale.

I owed a $975 remainder on a $3000 e-room visit. I sent an email asking if they'd discuss a settlement and they just called me and said the debt would be written off completely.

I was going to open the negotiation at $900 because that's what I had left in my HSA account.

So clearly it pays to ask. In my case it probably also helped that I had already paid more than half the bill. But I didn't even have to plead poverty - I just said something along the lines of "I'm trying to figure out how to best deploy the funds I have, would you discuss a settlement"?

I'm actually surprised this doesn't come up more in discussions about the cost of healthcare.

We were actually uninsured when we had our first child right around the time the ACA came into existence, and my wife had an epidural so it was about as expensive as a birth could be without a C-Section, and after the income based adjustment the bill went from something like $30,000 to only a couple thousand dollars I believe and they also offered a 12 month interest free payment plan.

It was definitely not a side of the industry that I had ever heard about.

Here is a law office that deals specifically with this: http://georgettemillerlaw.com/can-hospitals-garnish-my-wages...

I refinanced my house and as part of the process I get copies of the credit reports pulled. Anyone know why they last a lot longer than 7 years? It has all my mailing addresses for over 20 years. They asked me about a student loan I had paid off 10+ years prior. Is the "7 year" thing just a myth?

And it's worth noting that in medicine there's no fundamental boundary for 'may cost you your life', or if it is, the bar is very low. Taking an x-ray may cost you your life. Not taking an x-ray may cost you your life. Dentist's anaesthesia may cost you your life. Almost every noteworthy medical decision (including purely preventative things or running tests) has some life-or-death effect, there's only a difference in quantity, not a difference in kind. There are no life-saving procedures, there are only life-prolonging procedures. A widespread recommendation that patients meeting criteria X, Y and Z should do a particular diagnostic test will result in deaths of some people, and a widespread recommendation that they shouldn't will also result in deaths of some other people, and the main question is which number of deaths is larger.

On a large scale, medicine is mainly a resource allocation problem - almost everyone could and would live longer if we allocated more care towards them personally or towards that condition, however, the "price/performance ratio" of such procedures is very, very different. There are things like stopping bleeding from trauma, which are very cheap and prolong your life by as many years as you'd otherwise live, and there are drugs and procedures with a six figure price that give an average survival benefit of a few weeks over much cheaper alternatives; and for most of people who'll die in hospitals today we could extend their life by at least one day with extra care; it's just that it's currently physically impossible to do everything for everyone, even if our economy consisted 100% of doctors and nurses caring for each other, because now we can (attempt to) do so much more. So there has to be a line drawn somewhere; some care will inevitably have to be refused to some people, and the only debate can be about the criteria - whether it's medical criteria (e.g. being refused to be considered for an organ transplant since you'll likely die soon anyway for other reasons, and that transplant can give much more years to someone else), or the ability to pay for certain procedures, or some other ways. On a large scale metrics like $/QALY (price for a quality-adjusted life year) make sense, but on small scale it's difficult to judge.

So they'll treat your heart attack, but they're under no obligation to offer you free cancer treatment.

This quickly comes back to grandparent's point that the terms 'we' and 'survive' need to be more established. I can't imagine a single person who thinks that a situation that gives rise to advice like that is acceptable.

Yes, it's technically "theft", but the property right being violated has no business being granted in the first place.

Getting paperwork together took a while, medical bills arrive at odd times, often delay of six months. About 60 days for the actual bankruptcy to go through (the “Discharge Date”).

Then another 60 days as the bankruptcy is recorded on the credit record.

It says here that public records will be automatically dropped from my credit file after the appropriate interval. No action required. That would be 12 months from now. I wonder if that will actually happen.

Note that bankruptcy shows on a credit report, so if you are applying for a job, or trying to rent a flat, you are going to be asked about it. And so on.

I strongly advise against having a medical crisis. Stay normal as long as possible.

Good luck.

As someone who doesn't live une the US, maybe I can't figure the whole complexity of such a situation, be it really strikes me that people can recommend to fraud people that saved their life...

For example in a market where nobody is willing (or able) to buy your home, your net worth can be ... well, worthless. In a financial crisis it's even worse.

Your "on-demand" cash is what's in your checking or savings account. There's no guarantee you'll be able to tap into your home, car, 401K, etc. and even if you could, in the long term it may be more damaging to you. For instance in a city like Seattle if you sell your home, you could be looking at paying double or triple your previous mortgage in rent, so you're ultimately putting yourself in a worse position.

No, because if it's true that nobody is willing to buy your home, your home isn't worth the $300,000 you're claiming it is.

There's no single metric that works for all situations, but net worth is the best way to compare financial health between people and across a population in a meaningful way.

Similarly, for your investments, if the stock market takes a huge hit, your net worth will instantly become a fraction of what it currently is.

Cash will still be cash. (But also maybe worth less!)

There is no asset (including cash) that is guaranteed to preserve its value across arbitrary amounts of time under all circumstances. Even TIPS could theoretically be worthless if the government collapses.

That doesn't mean that net worth isn't still an excellent normalized comparison between arbitrary people or parts of a population today, which is exactly what we're talking about.

The fact is that it has never been easier or cheaper for individuals to invest in a reasonably diverse portfolio and grow their wealth. The problem is that the average American has no wealth to grow:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...

I am fairly convinced, based on the spending attitudes of many people I know, that even if they had extra money, they still would not invest. They would just spend it on a new 4K TV, new car, or a bigger house that they don't need. Most people seek immediate gratification.

2) Home equity line

3) Retirement account

It's not painless. Losing money never is. But you said "wipe out" not "will pay fees and lose 10% of net worth."

Mean, median, and mode are all averages and a lot of statistics actually refer to median when they say "average".

Survive also doesn't mean 'maintain standard of living.' The government has a surefire way of propping up the wealthy: Inflation. Savings accounts lose purchasing power (normal person) and the means of production gets more expensive (wealthy).

Also, when you have lots of assets, you can assume that lines of credit are available whenever you might ask for them. You are less likely to tap into emergency reserves, and may also set a lower target for those reserves if you know they only need to address the most dire scenario where you might have to abandon some of your augmented lifestyle.

Finally, with large wealth you have an opportunity to diversify into many independent assets and firewall them from one another, e.g. with limited liability structures. Having one of your investments implode is qualitatively different from having your whole wealth implode. This is the entire premise of VC investment and I would have thought obvious to this audience...

Inflation does not imply growth in real GDP, no.

> which generally raises the value of equity holdings. The impact of inflation is dependent upon asset allocation.

Ceteris paribus, inflation hurts debtholders (who, incidentally, tend to be wealthy), and it helps debtors (who, incidentally, tend to be poorer).

Is this controversial?

>"This is backwards. Inflation destroys the value of debt. Poor tend to be borrowers and rich tend to be lenders, so inflation is an equalizer."

chimeracoder seemed to be agreeing with this "equalizer" position by saying:

>"Ceteris paribus, inflation hurts debtholders (who, incidentally, tend to be wealthy), and it helps debtors (who, incidentally, tend to be poorer)."

Now, true, if you're a worker who owes money, and inflation kills your cash flow (because raises come later than price increases), it may not matter to you that the value of your debt decreased, because the cash flow problem is going to bankrupt you before the debt erosion helps you. But it's still a separate effect.

Also, this is ignoring that anyone sane issuing debt plans for inflation and accounts for this somehow (interest rate schedule, etc)...

Edit:

Another thing, this "inflation helps the poor idea" seems to be a version of trickle down economics.

What I am talking about here is debt. Owe money on your house? Inflation makes you owe less. Lend money to someone buying a house? Inflation means you get paid back less.

Except that's not true. If you're a debtor, the effects of inflation decreasing your debt in real dollars is orders of magnitude more consequential than the increase in your expenses, and that's even assuming your wages don't increase (which is generally not true either).

Ain't this what Americans say when describing Communism?