I agree. People just expect to be coddled these days and that isn’t OK either. These predatory loans are bad as well. I think loans on cars that cost as much as a house are a bad idea. $80,000 can buy you a decent small house around here. That will retain value while a car will be worth very little in short order. The most expensive cars are often the WORST about this.
A guy at the local Autozone told me he was looking for some decent $1000 or less cars. I had some ideas for him. The next time I was in there he was in a 10 year old BMW 7 series. He paid $1000 for it. That was probably close to a $100,000 car when bought new. He said he has had plenty of these and really enjoys driving them. The issue is that when ANY little thing goes wrong it becomes uneconomical to repair. He then just sells them for parts, often at or near what he paid for it running, and moves on down the road to the next one. It seems the guys who work at parts stores always come across the best deals on used cars. Look at how little that $100,000 car is worth in 10 years. That is nuts if you ask me ad a terrible waste of money. I understand this is quite common with cars that start out expensive. They depreciate the fastest.
I know people who go through cars all the time but they never buy new because they know that they will lose so much money when they get sick of it and trade it every few months to a year. I know one guy who used to do this and actually make a decent amount of money. The DMV finally sent him a letter saying he needed to apply for a dealer’s license if he bought and sold more than X cars per year. He cut back a tad after this. He enjoyed getting a new (to him) car all the time but was smart enough to understand that buying new wasn’t the way to do this.
Yes, I have had to deal with those living on the fringes and now try to avoid this. They are the ones who want to make a payment plan for some tiny amount of money and then don’t pay. Even if they do, the extra effort just makes it not worthwhile for me. They don’t want to play by the rules of society overall and that is why they are where they are.
Unfortunately it seems that every industry is full of scams these days. I was talking to a realty agent and he was telling me there is a way for scammers to look up people who are LIKELY involved in property transactions. I guess there is some way to track this and see who is buying or selling property. Of course people are all stressed because everything is so hectic during these transactions. The scammers will call them and say they owe like $500 for some title or deed fee and many people just pay it without question.
In my line of work (computers), it is the tech support scam. These are pure scum and total predators as well. There is no pretense about helping people. It is just about taking their money and not providing any product or service. Basically there are many ways these work but I see two the most frequently. The one I have been seeing in recent weeks the most is a pop-up telling people to call a phone number displayed IMMEDIATELY or else something terrible will happen. People actually do this and pay them $1000 or more quite frequently. The other are phone calls saying they are Microsoft and you need to give them access to your computer to fix some problem. Once they are in, they install a bunch of malware and backdoors and the hook is set for the scammers. I personally see about $100,000-120,000 sucked out of the local economy each month due to these scams and I am only one guy. I can’t imagine just how much is going out and there are people I come across who are completely unaware they have been scammed until I tell them.
They say that half of all phone calls are basically fraudulent these days. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/19/nearly-half-cellphone-calls-will-be-scams-by-report-says/?utm_term=.45f3a994c7ce That is a sad commentary on our times if you ask me but I feel is is probably dead on accurate. Can anyone make an honest living anymore? I have one poor guy who keeps falling for these scams. I have warned him over and over. I have a big strip of paper with BRIGHT RED BOLD TEXT reading “IF ANYONE CALLS IT IS A SCAM!” on both the upper and lower bezel of his laptop. I even took away his administrative rights to his own computer so it would be harder for them to get in. He keeps calling me and tells me he has allowed them in again. Not only does he do this, he gives them account numbers for TWO bank accounts each time so he has to go to the bank and file a fraud claim, then get all new account numbers and contact everyone because he has new accounts. I lost count of how many times he has done this but it is easily 12-20 times so far. I keep telling him how to stop this but he keeps doing it.
Scams in general seem to be a huge problem these days. I wonder when it will ever stop. I fell for the HomeAdvisor scam myself. I thought this would be a good way to pickup jobs for my business but it was also just a scam. I had to file a fraud report and get a new debit card number as well. There is a class action against this company as well. I didn’t end up paying them anything so didn’t participate myself but would have had they come after me.
Here is information on the TitleMax class action: https://www.titlemaxclaim.com/
People need to be educated about what they are getting themselves into and most of this stuff, whether is be bad car loan, or straight up scams, wouldn’t be an issue.
. That’s been a few years ago, but the same principle applies. I don’t have $50k cash to plunk down on a brand new truck. So I don’t get one. That’s life.