According to Wikipedia, debt is “the amount of money or other items that a person or organization owes” or “the amount of money owed to someone else.” I am not sure what it meant by “owe,” but it could have been whatever that word was in your mind, so let’s look at debt.
I remember when the economy was doing great and everything was quite pleasing and fees didn’t seem to apply to anyone. My favourite was the developer that came to buy a retail store at the registered shopping centre I owned and we were off and running. This was before developers were allowed to purchase any building directly from the owner or owners, so it was nice. I will stop there and tell you how I got lucky enough to own a retail centre, but my point is that you never know until you take the first step.
Fast forward to where things took a turn for the worse and my rent was about to be due. I mentally prepared myself for the worst, but still couldn’t quite grasp that all my loans would be going into foreclosure. I was going to have to be dealt with by the bank. I got depressed as I needed to go out and find another paying job. The bank called me several times, and I decided to bite the bullet and give them $2,000 to work with.
Three months later they gave me another call and asked me about my battle with the taxman. Yes, I ended up owing the bureaus about $500 in penalties. So I did struggle with this to a degree, as I ended up having to give back about $5,000. But you have to remember that the first 5 months were total confusion and I did pay some money out to get me back on my feet. Also, I had filed bankruptcy and I needed to be able to get that out of the way, as it would destroy my credit.
Fast forward, 4 years, and I am still trying to pay some of the companies back, although I have gotten some reimbursement for the back taxes already. Lose kind of. So the companies make offers, positive ones. It’s kind of like the cakewalk these days. Here me out of the proverbial hat and get a fresh start. This has not happened the right way, so this is how I learned it.
Basically, the company I due was willing to accept only if I was willing to type up azer department and give them a TV or something. Once I got the eventual documentation, I called the specific lender and asked to speak to a pop. Again, I got the same parking lot fiasco treatment. They wanted me to actually produce the implement and that was just totally ridiculous. I told them that I needed their Hitmen to go out and make me feel better. I then proceeded to tell them all kinds of other fabricated stories and most of them were stories that I had actually told. Some of them were true, but some of them were not.
Eventually, I got tired of dealing with all these lies and calls from these as clicks calling me all the time. I hired a lawyer to go in there and take care of it. He charged me a couple of thousand dollars, but nothing was work-related or something like that, which was pretty cool. Also, he told me that he would take care of the paperwork and all that kind of stuff, so I would not be held up in the process.
Well, he did take care of everything and I finally got around to paying some of the money that I owed. Then, some paperwork went missing, and then I was all screwed up again. I went to a casino and took a bunch of casino licenses because they were all of a sudden need for a bunch of different things, but they were wrong. They showed up at the casino while I was gambling with my credit card at the same time. I then drove away with hundreds of dollars in winnings that I would have owed had I gambled with cash.
I then went to an attorney to file a police report about this issue. He reported me on the short end of a 2in. box, without saying that I was in the casino having fun and then driving away with $900,000 dollars. (I didn’t have 900,000 dollars, I had hundreds of thousands.)
I learned a valuable lesson, if you want something done right, you have to do it right. Make sure that you understand what the laws are before you do something like I did.
I am never, ever going to gamble again unless I can cut out some of my gambling habits and replace it with something that won’t cost me an arm and a leg in cash. Unfortunately, because of the way that society is set up, you can’t really have either.