Be Careful What You Give Your Life To
Nobody will ever tells the truth, everybody only says what is politically correct and restates the common wisdom. We have been lulled into a place of complicity. There are totally new financial problems that the average families are facing in financial and retirement planning, they need totally new solutions. They need a new paradigm. Albert Einstein when ask why he gave the same final exam every year said “The questions are the same but the answers have changed”;since these are new problem there needs to be new solutions. What I am about to say will have financial experts wanting to have me “burned at the stake”. I will be hated for my willingness to dare say that the Emperor has no cloths. I can’t sit still and watch what is called “Common Wisdom” totally replace “Common Sense”. Carl Sagan said, “We simply accepted what the most widely available and accessible source of information claimed is true. For our naiveté we are systematically misled and bamboozled.” I know what I am about to tell you sounds crazy but I beg you to think about it before you decide.
Here it is; If you can’t pay your bills, don’t pay your bills. Don’t worry I will provide the common sense solution. If you look back at history we have always looked up to people who were proactive; people who were in a bad circumstance and did whatever it took to change those circumstances’. For instance the Pilgrims were persecuted for their religion. At some point they decided “We can either stay here in England and be persecuted or we can pack up and go to America”. We admire their ability to take control of a situation. The history of the world is full of stories where people had to make a decision either to continue to suffer or brave the unknown and chose liberty. Just the sound of those words will give you goose bumps. I’m sure there were people who called them quitters. People who told them just conform to the “Common Wisdom” and everything will be just fine.
Why the history lesson in a financial blog? What could persecution have to do with debt? I believe that DEBT COLLECTION is a form of persecution that has become so ingrained in our society that we don’t even recognize it. We accept the authority of people and institution that in truth have no authority. Did you vote or did you have your Congressman vote to set up an agency that can collect information on you in secrete and sell it to the highest bidder? Did you think it would just be great if this agency set up a “Double Secrete scoring formula that is guarded better than the formula for Coke which can dictate how much money almost everything cost you, where you live, what you drive, where your kids go to school and even how much your car insurance cost? Oh I know you thought “Wouldn’t it be fun if every time you violated any of this wonderful agency’s rule they could maybe call you at work and home and harass you. Make you feel like a real deadbeat because you missed one of their payments?
If you didn’t give the credit bureaus this power then they really don’t have it. I heard a story about 2 African tribes were about to fight a battle. They lined up across from each other and the strongest warrior from one tribe went out in front of his army and taunted the other tribe. The other tribe did not have a mighty warrior to send out but they did have a renowned witch doctor to send out. All the tribes believe that this witch doctor was very powerful. He moved in close to the powerful warrior and pointed a stick at him. The witch doctor sited a curse of death and pointed the stick at the warrior who dropped dead on the spot. You and I both know that the stick had no power other than the power that the warrior himself gave it. His very believes killed him. The credit bureaus are very similar to the Voodoo stick in that the power they have is mostly in your head. I have been doing radio shows all over America for the last few years. Many times I have had people come up and thank me for simplifying the complicated mess that they were in. A lady caller told me she had worked all of her life at the same place. She had raised 2 kids by herself. The owner of her company was killed in a car accident and the business was closed. She had bought a new house the year before. While looking for a new job she spent all her IRA money and charge up her credit cards paying one with another.
The mortgage market bottomed out and she owed about $50,000 more than her house was worth. She had taken another job at half her pay just to buy food and gas but she was getting farther and farther behind on her mortgage, credit cards and car payments. She talked to a bankruptcy attorney but she didn’t even have the money to pay him and even if she did bankruptcy would not solve her problem. That house payment was killing her. In fact the way she sounded I would say pressure was getting to be too much to bear. She had to stop talking twice because she was crying. I was having a hard time not crying with her. Conventional wisdom would not get her out of this mess. No matter how strong her desire to pay back the money she owed, she could not. It was tearing her up inside. I could tell this was a good hearted lady that had come to the end and needed some relief. She would always answer the phone calls from her creditor and try to explain her problem. They showed no mercy and berated her and made her feel like a crook. Her Aunt told her to call my radio show “Warr On Debt” that she had heard me tell other good people that had “Mortgage Cancer” the cure. Here is what I said. The first thing you need to do is stop the phone calls. I ask her if she had a cell phone which she did so I told her to disconnect her home phone. I told her to call her friends and tell them that she did not need a home phone anymore. Next stop paying any credit cards anything. Stop paying any mortgage payments. Just those things would save her $1,700 per month. Her house payment was $899 per month so I told her to save $400 per month in a tin can. It will take the mortgage company probably 10 or 11 months to evict her so when they do she will have over $4,000 saved in her tin can. With $4,000 she can find another place to live easy. She was worried about not paying a debt she owes so I told her that when her economic situation gets better to send whatever she thought was the right amount to the creditors with a money order that does not have her name on it. That way she feels better about paying her debt and they can’t start up with her again because they don’t know where the money came from. I told her I would send her a copy of my article “The FICO God” ( Click Here if you want the article) which will help her understand that not only is it possible to have a life with a low credit score but you can have a much more rewarding stress free life with a low credit score. You can still buy houses and cars and have credit cards but you will lower your use of them because you will have what a friend of mine calls “Warm Fluffy Cash”. And the last thing I told her was that when you fly, before you take off the Airline Attendant always says “If the oxygen mask drops put it on yourself first before you put it on your child”. That because if you don’t survive your child probably won’t either. You are going to lose your house anyway make sure you have enough money to move, you’re credit is already shot for the next 7 years and bankruptcy stays on your record for 10 years. (She lived in Texas so they can’t garnish her wage but even if they did it would be less than paying all the bills plus they don’t know where she works or lives) With bankruptcy you may still have to pay you credit cards and it ruins your credit anyway so why not keep the money now when you need it to have it to survive.
The businesses that lent you the money made a business decision that if you paid it all back they would make a lot of money and they built in to your bill and everyone else’s bill a fact to pay for the people that could not pay. Frankly they wouldn’t spite on you if you were on fire. They are a business; don’t pretend they have a soul. Keep your word and pay them when you can. I told you that the financial experts would want to burn me at the stake but you cannot give your life to creditors; you need to live your life in a way that is good for you and your family. Your family needs to come first even if it hurts your pride that you can’t pay your bills. Art Williams wrote a book that the title tells the story. The title is “All You Can Do Is All You Can Do but All You Can Do Is Enough”. Jesus said “Go forth and sin no more”. Start now! I always ended my show with this statement which I believe follow
“If I can help I Will” so if you would like my help email me at jimwarr@jimwarr.com or call 512-215-3633 Ext 100. “Say no to the drug of gradualness. It was Martin Luther King, Jr., who spoke out strongly against making slow changes. Either we risk or we don’t, he said. Either we change or we don’t. There’s no acceptable middle ground because it lulls us into complacency. Lasting changes rarely occur when we ease our way into the future. They come when we leap. The leap themselves can be small or large. Once we take action, we see things differently and for many of us there’s no going back.” Nov 27, 2009 4:21:49 PM Comment 0Reblog It Next » Warr On Debt,Life Insurance,Income, Taxes,401(k)s Jim Warr replaces “Conventional Wisdom” with “Common Sense.”
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