June 6, 2007
Finally watched Maxed Out
I have wanted to watch this documentary for some time now. There was even a post about Debt Documentaries awhile back when I started this blog. Well I have seen it and this could be considered a review from my perspective.
This documentary is emotional because not only do you see what debt does to people, but that you see what it does to people. Blogs make it easy to hide behind a veil of being relatively anonymous on the internet. If we passed each other on the street you would not know who I am and I wouldn’t know anything about you. I think it is the people that make the documentary so powerful.
Part of this documentary focuses on people who buy up the bad debt people defaulted on. They operate out of a small office where their collectors are busy calling (harassing?) people through the phone to get money out of them. There is a whiteboard and they make the comparison that it is a game and it is all about making a touchdown or scoring. What bothers me more is they feel it is legit to call up neighbors and family members of the individual they are collecting on. There are laws out there called Fair Debt Collection Practices Act which their victims don’t seem to know much about.
One story with an older lady having a garage sale to come up with enough money to keep her house is very sad. I don’t know much about the background of her situation, but the reality is she needs to be selling her house and not trying to hold on to it. There are also stories of two other ladies and the financial happenings of their children which was very powerful.
Then there is the political side of this in that the government is making it more and more difficult for people. Credit card companies don’t have regulations in place to prevent giving a college student with no income a credit card. President Bush signed a new bankruptcy law into place but the bill was funded by MBNA. The debt that I have got myself into is my debt and I have nobody to blame but myself. I’m not going to pretend the government is going to fix my problems with credit card debt. Our own government is in so much debt and the problem is not going to correct itself over night, but one day it could blow up on us all.
Comments(8)