United Gnosis said:
When i self-exiled from Canada in 2010, I decided to call the system's bluff and disconnect from my (humble) debt, thinking about the illegitimacy of it all, in front of banks printing trillions for themselves.
All in all, about 3-4k of credit card debt (linked to my bank account) and about 6-7k in student debt (held by government, with same bank). I withdrew all cash from my account (and quickly went broke, that's a different story) and withheld from any communication with authorities.
My relatives received harassing phone calls from legally powerless debt collectors for nearly two years. This is the only consequence of my behaviour that I feel sorry about, as it should not have been their burden to bear such harassment. By that point, I logged back into my bank account online to find out the credit card had been deactivated AND removed from my account, with all related negative balance disappeared.
Another 2 years later (2014) I came back to accompany my grandfather in his transition, and subsequently decided to stay and see what kind of Work had been prepared for me here. When I decided to put my papers in order, I called the bank and realized my account had been removed. Not deactivated, mind you, but deleted, along with all records - they could neither find my folio number nor my name.
I thank the DCM for that blessing. It's purely material but definitely removed a burden from my shoulders and allowed me to open up to the tasks at hand, free from worries. Would I do it again, even if the debt didn't get wiped away? Hell yes, as stacking more debt unbalanced by actual assets is yst another straw on the camel's back, hopefully contributing just a tiny little bit to the inevitable collapse of the current economic paradigm.
Ah. The duck and cover method of debt management.
So long as you're a small fish, I think that could work. -Where the cost of the worker/researcher hours required to go after you weighed against the potential net reward of successfully collecting determines whether or not your file lands on somebody's desk and how much attention it is given when it does. Factors like how much material possession you have which could be seized and auctioned off, (car, house, business), are probably figured into their blood-calculus.
The way debt collection works, (I researched this a few years back when I was barely-making-rent-broke and had a variety of collectors after me, including government, banking and private), is that your debt is sold by the people you initially owe, to a collection agency. The collection agency pays something like 70 cents on the dollar. So the initial creditor takes a hit, but gets paid, and then it's up to the collection agency to get the full amount from the target person in order to finance their own operations. The level of harassment allowable under law is determined by whatever region you live in.
During this cruddy period, I happened to have an outstanding shipping bill. -I'd paid the actual quoted shipping portion; this was a second bill from their customs department, so basically a tax, -one of the more opaque, unevenly enforced, and often seemingly arbitrary taxes, -and one with no realistic system of recourse available if you want to contest it. -Normally I'd just pay those bills and shake my head, but for whatever reason this time I was feeling angry and jilted with the details of the transaction and dug my heels in. It was only worth one or two hundred dollars, but I was totally unmotivated to pay up and equally unmotivated to waste any time and adrenaline arguing with anybody about it. So I simply ignored their threatening form letters until it went to a collection agency. Then I ignored the collection agency's letters.
-Interestingly, the shipping company considered this to be the end of the matter; they'd sold the debt to a third party and continued to do business with me as before. That surprised me, but I suppose in a world where debt is a commodity, it makes (a kind of) sense.
Anyway, the collection agency (I assume it was them) (EDIT*** Yes, it was; I did a call trace one time.) -anyway, they called every day for about a year. When I'd pick up the phone, an automated message instructed me to stay on the line and wait for an operator. -It didn't even identify itself, just cold instructions. I felt this to be an amazingly a rude way to begin a conversation, so I'd simply hang up. I figured, "If a human takes the time to call me and is polite, I'll talk with them and maybe we can finally have that argument and work something out. But no way am I going to obey a frickin' machine."
Well, an actual person never called once the whole time, and I eventually got used to simply ignoring the phone when it rang. Most of my communications are via email these days, and I talk face to face with friends; I'd sometimes just leave the phone unplugged for days at a time and only plug it in when I wanted to have a chat with somebody far away. For a while it was aggravating and a bit scary to know that there were vultures circling, (half-hearted and automated as they may be), but eventually it just became background static. Then after a year or so, I noticed that they had stopped calling. The end.
I don't know what the policy would be if it were a higher amount of money at stake, or if there's a collection record out there ready to be re-activated at a moment's notice, but that's how that experience went.
