No, I’m not sure how it happened. I found some default judgements against me searching threw court records; but it wasn’t on my credit at that point. I did expect to be hit by a surprise garnishment or seized tax return. But they never came.
I’m guessing I fell through the cracks during some data migration. I doubt you could pull that off today.
I’m not an expert on this obviously but that seems like a wild loophole? Someone can just flee the country and come back after 7 years with no repercussion?
IIRC, there’s a difference between entries expiring from a credit report, and whether a debt is still legally collectable. If the holder of a debt can prove the debt is still outstanding, or has it ratified as a court judgement (and renewals the judgement, as local rules may require), then it may still be pursued once someone returns to the personal jurisdiction of the court.
The thing is, though, since the original creditor will have wanted to get something rather than nothing, they may choose to sell the debt to a debt collection service, conveying the legal rights to pursue the debt. In return, the original creditor gets a fraction of their money back. But even the most prodigious debt collectors may give up and sell the debt to someone else, for pennies on the dollar. As the value of the debt keeps shrinking, those fixed costs to keep the debt collectable (eg maintaining paperwork, renewing a judgement) become disproportionate and thus skipped.
At the very end of the chain are debt collectors with such a huge catalog of bad, uncollectable debt, but they’re hoping they can schmooze or bamboozle the debtors into paying one day. As with all debt collectors, they have no right to add renewed entries to someone’s credit report, so the debt is essentially in limbo: unenforceable yet still on paper.
When I was 20 years old, I took everything I had and moved to New York City. I was unemployed and squatting at a friend’s place. On my birthday, my grandmother mailed me a check for $100, and I realized I’d need a bank account to cash it. So I went to Washington Mutual, opened an account, and deposited my check.
Then the clerk asked if I wanted a credit card. I told him I was unemployed. He said that was fine, and they’d just give me a “starter” card with a low limit.
So that’s how WaMu effectively gave me $1,000 for opening a checking account and all I had to do was not answer my phone for about a decade.
There’s a fascinating piece of banking history embedded here, since for a fairly long time, the economics of USA banking meant that long-term banking relationships generated the most revenue for the bank. So they would go out of their way to establish new relationships that would hopefully endure for decades, thus keeping the bank in business. This applies even if a small percentage of those attempts would be losses, because the average was still mostly upsides.
Today, the banking landscape is much more transactional, where lots of people have no qualms jumping ship to an online bank. Sure, not everyone will go through that inconvenience, but enough will that it upsets the prior calculus that prioritized long-term relationships to achieve long-term value. That of course means that there’s less upside to extending a $1k unprotected credit line and all the same downsides. Hence, credit issuers are more stingy now than in the past.
The obvious problem that this exacerbates is that people who never had access to banking have poorer chances of ever getting served once they do need banking services, because that first account needs to meet strict credit approval requirements or whatever. The very fact that a steady 4.5% of American households can’t meet the bank minimum balance requirements, while “non bank” services like payday loans and buy-now-pay-later are on the rise, is a reminder that opportunities from yesteryear are disappearing rapidly, concentrating to those that already have plenty of opportunity.
Past institutions and past people did what made sense at the time, but it’s quite clear that in the present, the situation is not serving the people’s needs. The corporate desire to grow bank market share or shareholder value is precisely the opposite of what sustainable banks should be doing: right-sizing their scope to match what their clientele can afford. If a bank can only stay in business by having a $1500 minimum monthly balance, then they should close and a smaller, nimbler bank or credit union that only needs $400 to be sustainable should take their place. Banks grew to match the needs of the public. If the public’s needs have changed, so must they.
No, TV licence is money you pay to the government and is therefore a matter of national security. Since you’re now a terrorist you can expect a visit from MI6 who will make sure you’re a non-threat from that point on.
It’s a little more complicated than that… They have 7 years from the time you stopped paying to file a suit. If you make a payment to them after 6 years, the clock resets, and they get another 7 years.
Technically, the clock stops while you’re out of the country, but if they don’t know when you left and when you returned, they don’t know how much time they have.
Wait what? Did you find out why you had no credit history rather than a bad one? Did you expect some legal issues when you moved back to the US?
No, I’m not sure how it happened. I found some default judgements against me searching threw court records; but it wasn’t on my credit at that point. I did expect to be hit by a surprise garnishment or seized tax return. But they never came.
I’m guessing I fell through the cracks during some data migration. I doubt you could pull that off today.
Ya I think someone really blessed you lol
Everything drops off after 7 years.
I’m not an expert on this obviously but that seems like a wild loophole? Someone can just flee the country and come back after 7 years with no repercussion?
IIRC, there’s a difference between entries expiring from a credit report, and whether a debt is still legally collectable. If the holder of a debt can prove the debt is still outstanding, or has it ratified as a court judgement (and renewals the judgement, as local rules may require), then it may still be pursued once someone returns to the personal jurisdiction of the court.
The thing is, though, since the original creditor will have wanted to get something rather than nothing, they may choose to sell the debt to a debt collection service, conveying the legal rights to pursue the debt. In return, the original creditor gets a fraction of their money back. But even the most prodigious debt collectors may give up and sell the debt to someone else, for pennies on the dollar. As the value of the debt keeps shrinking, those fixed costs to keep the debt collectable (eg maintaining paperwork, renewing a judgement) become disproportionate and thus skipped.
At the very end of the chain are debt collectors with such a huge catalog of bad, uncollectable debt, but they’re hoping they can schmooze or bamboozle the debtors into paying one day. As with all debt collectors, they have no right to add renewed entries to someone’s credit report, so the debt is essentially in limbo: unenforceable yet still on paper.
When I was 20 years old, I took everything I had and moved to New York City. I was unemployed and squatting at a friend’s place. On my birthday, my grandmother mailed me a check for $100, and I realized I’d need a bank account to cash it. So I went to Washington Mutual, opened an account, and deposited my check.
Then the clerk asked if I wanted a credit card. I told him I was unemployed. He said that was fine, and they’d just give me a “starter” card with a low limit.
So that’s how WaMu effectively gave me $1,000 for opening a checking account and all I had to do was not answer my phone for about a decade.
There’s a fascinating piece of banking history embedded here, since for a fairly long time, the economics of USA banking meant that long-term banking relationships generated the most revenue for the bank. So they would go out of their way to establish new relationships that would hopefully endure for decades, thus keeping the bank in business. This applies even if a small percentage of those attempts would be losses, because the average was still mostly upsides.
Today, the banking landscape is much more transactional, where lots of people have no qualms jumping ship to an online bank. Sure, not everyone will go through that inconvenience, but enough will that it upsets the prior calculus that prioritized long-term relationships to achieve long-term value. That of course means that there’s less upside to extending a $1k unprotected credit line and all the same downsides. Hence, credit issuers are more stingy now than in the past.
The obvious problem that this exacerbates is that people who never had access to banking have poorer chances of ever getting served once they do need banking services, because that first account needs to meet strict credit approval requirements or whatever. The very fact that a steady 4.5% of American households can’t meet the bank minimum balance requirements, while “non bank” services like payday loans and buy-now-pay-later are on the rise, is a reminder that opportunities from yesteryear are disappearing rapidly, concentrating to those that already have plenty of opportunity.
Past institutions and past people did what made sense at the time, but it’s quite clear that in the present, the situation is not serving the people’s needs. The corporate desire to grow bank market share or shareholder value is precisely the opposite of what sustainable banks should be doing: right-sizing their scope to match what their clientele can afford. If a bank can only stay in business by having a $1500 minimum monthly balance, then they should close and a smaller, nimbler bank or credit union that only needs $400 to be sustainable should take their place. Banks grew to match the needs of the public. If the public’s needs have changed, so must they.
In the UK its called the Limitations Act 1980.
You cannot sue someone or enforce a debt 6 years after the event in question.
Oh nice. So that the half year I spent in the UK without paying tv licensing, that is just forgotten by now?
No, TV licence is money you pay to the government and is therefore a matter of national security. Since you’re now a terrorist you can expect a visit from MI6 who will make sure you’re a non-threat from that point on.
Source: my ass.
They are coming for you
For that particular licence yeah. But if you come back and start watching TV again…watch yourself
A mirror then
It’s a little more complicated than that… They have 7 years from the time you stopped paying to file a suit. If you make a payment to them after 6 years, the clock resets, and they get another 7 years.
Technically, the clock stops while you’re out of the country, but if they don’t know when you left and when you returned, they don’t know how much time they have.
depends on the type of debt, but yeah alot of they’re basically boned if they got nothing to collect. they just write it off from gains elsewhete
I think it resets after 7 years, but I could be wrong and don’t know the specifics of how that works
FCRA and the like. Most things will end up being unreportable after about 7 years, but there are exceptions and gotchas