Debt Hope: Down and Dirty Survival Strategies by Mark Hankins

Type the word ‘debt’ into Google and you’ll get over 74,000,000 hits, most of them sites offering bad information, false information, or even friendly looking traps set by banks and creditors. 

Once in awhile though, if you really look or are very lucky, you find a trustworthy, truthful resource.

Debt Hope: Down and Dirty Survival Strategies by Mark S. Hankins is one such resource. Anyone can download it online for a very modest charge from Hankins’s website My Debt Hope. You can also get a free taste by downloading the Scribd Evaluation Version.

Debt Hope sets itself apart from quite a few similar books in that it is 1) accurate, 2) not aimed at a particular religious or political group, and 3) nonjudgmental. 

The book is mostly facts and information, not political or religious banter and not empty platitudes that sound really inspiring but upon closer inspection aren’t all that helpful.

When I worked at the bank, I saw collections abuse after abuse day after day, and in 99.9% of the cases the person calling was completely shocked and clueless about what was happening and whether it was legal or not. When I was an insurance agent I worked beside a former collections guy who once chased a guy down the street up to his front door after stalking him for weeks. 

OK, that’s not OK. 

But if you don’t educate yourself, you won’t know. My sense of it is that as the recession deepens and more and more people can’t pay their debts, debt collectors are becoming even more aggressive and intimidating than before. So it’s more important than ever to understand what they’re about and what you can do.

Consumer Debt, Personal Shame

In other venues, I’ve written extensively about the history of debt and banking as it relates to the American Revolution. Most people don’t know (and our history books usually omit or gloss over) the fact that the U.S. was initially a place for Britain to dump its debtors. If you take the popular press as your guide, you’d think that the current wave of American consumer debt is unprecedented in all of recorded history. 

Not so. Basically we’re just returning to how it’s always been, give or take a hundred years or so when it was an eensy bit better, for awhile. 

The first attempts at dumping debtors in America began as a criminal sentence called “Transportation,” which simply meant that instead of getting thrown into debtor’s prison or hanged, you were transported to America to work off your debt.

Cool, right? The Land of Opportunity and all that.

Wrong. Transportation was the worst sentence a debtor could get, because it usually meant almost certain death, and not just death, but a painful slow death. Unlike death by hanging (which was often expedited by friends of the accused who showed up to make sure death was swift), or the slow death by starvation in debtor’s prison (someone might still bail you out or pass food to your through a street grate), transportation meant you would feel your death acutely and without option of escape.

Either you would die in transit on the ship, or you would be brutally worked to death with little food. 

In the mid 1600s nearly 200 orphan children were removed from the streets of London and transported to America to work on the plantations. A year later, all were dead. 

Later, when public sentiment began to decry such practices and it looked like debtor’s prisons would soon be closed (they were actually closed in Britain before they were closed in the U.S.), future Americans came here as ‘indentured servants’, which basically is a nice word for ‘debt slave’. Indenture often lasted 7 years, but things could go wrong easily. During a period of indenture the servant had few rights or protections.

So although we like to tell a story about freedom of religion and personal initiative, the truth is that the vast majority of American settlers were either sent here in lieu of debtor’s prison, or came here willingly to avoid debt, or agreed to debt to come here and then defaulted once on American soil. 

The American Revolution was fought for freedom from taxation? OK, and also to erase the debts of the big plantations here, so the owners could keep the money instead of sending it to their creditors in Britain.

I’m just saying.

Double Standard

From the very beginning, personal debt has been seen as shameful and a sign of lack of character or even sinfulness, while business or corporate debt has been seen as a value-neutral thing that happens in business from time to time as free markets adjust themselves. 

Personal debt makes you bad. Business debt happens and you reorganize.

Certainly we’ve seen this double standard recently with the extreme coddling of banks and mortgage lenders, who basically pulled off the biggest transfer of wealth in human history without consequence, while the poor and the unemployed are at the same time ruthlessly judged as irresponsible leeches at every turn. 

This may seem nuts but it’s actually totally expected, historically speaking. It has always been thus. 

With so many people out of work (President Obama keeps saying 8 million jobs have been lost, but in reality it’s 15 million easily, and some experts put the figure since the crash as high as 30 million), more and more people are falling into debt.

When, for the first time in your life, you find yourself with debts you cannot pay, you discover quickly that no one wants to talk about debt, and the people who do want to talk about it are not usually on your side. (See clip of Mark, above.) It’s also very upsetting, even if you are by nature a calm, rational person. 

I consider myself to be a thinking, mostly calm person, but I confess the avalanche of medical debt that followed my partner’s serious five month illness in late 2008 and early 2009 has left me gobsmacked. Try as I might, I can’t seem to talk about it without totally losing my cookies and going on and on until my audience starts to look around nervously for the nearest exit.

Let’s just say it’s not my finest moment and, although I probably under-estimate my competence here, I feel swamped and angry, a lot, my two least favorite feelings in the whole world. 

It just seems so wrong. After 25 years of hard work and dutiful payment of insurance premiums, the first time we need the insurance we are left with debts that might wipe us out anyway just as we approach retirement. Talking with other people to find out how THEY handle such insane amounts of debt results in responses that can be as maddening as the debt itself:

• Just throw the bills away. We’re not really ‘throw the bills away’ kinds of people. But the truth is, if you do this, it can eventually go south on you in a very unpleasant way. I know a guy who was garnished almost immediately after making formal payment arrangements for an ER bill. He was uninsured and making $8/hr at the time. He couldn’t really afford it but too bad. 
• Call and make payment arrangements or sit down with the medical social workers at the hospital. Perhaps in a kinder, gentler time, such persons existed. Now, if you call, you are told that payment arrangements are no longer possible, or that you can make weekly payments of hundreds of dollars or pay the balance within two months. Even this might be possible for some people, but when you have, say, 50 separate bills coming every month—and that does happen—it’s just not an option. 
• File bankruptcy. This may or may not be possible but it isn’t free and there are consequences attached to that choice that not everyone wants to accept. If you are older and have a 401k, you may not be able to file at all because you will be expected to give over your retirement to your medical creditors—a particularly harsh option if you are unwell and not likely to be able to work until you die.
• It’s your own fault, you should have [fill in the blank]. Yeah, um, not helpful. 
• This is depressing, stop talking about it. See it’s your own fault, above. 

Down and Dirty Survival Strategies

Hankins’ book explains the how the debt collection industry operates and describes its various tactics in incredible detail, including their own ‘down and dirty’ strategies—strategies I’d wager 98% of formerly working people aren’t even aware of. 

The book then goes on to list a variety of steps you can take to sort and prioritize your various debts, settle some of your larger debts for a portion of what you owe, and avoid court or deal with being sued rationally and effectively if at some point you can’t avoid this outcome. 

Knowing what to watch out for and what to attend to and what to ignore is enormously helpful, since the first thing that happens when you can’t pay is EVERYONE says they come first or else. Reading the book feels a little bit like reading your first book about sex when you don’t know what sex is. You have all these questions you are ashamed to ask. Hankins answers them before you have to ask. That’s very cool. 

Hankins is also realistic and at no point promises that one quick trick will solve all your problems or that you will come out of your personal debt crisis unscathed and ready to buy a nice house and get an unsecured loan. You could come out very much the worse for wear. It happens. But it’s almost certain that you’ll come out even worse than THAT if you don’t have good information.

I’ll be honest: Not all parts of the book are an easy read. 

In fact, the hardest part for most debtors will likely be finding the courage to read the book at all. I know this from my experience in the financial industry and my own personal experience with the medical stuff. Facing it is totally the hardest part. 

That said, I honestly think every working person (and certainly every unemployed person) should download a copy of this book and keep it on the desktop. Read it thoroughly and go back to it as necessary. Know what may be coming and have a plan for how you will cope. Realize that I am giving you this advice even though I would happily hide in the bathroom all day on some days if I could. 

But I can’t. 

In the end, fighting back is always better than curling up and just taking it. 

This book tells you how. 

Totally worth $8.99. 

Comments

[Michelle]

Awesome post. I love the history of paying debts. We've come a long way, but have we? I suppose not really, considering what people really do go through, all the stories you DON'T hear or see on the news. Wonderful book review, Pam. Thanks.

[Pamela Grundy, Senior Editor]

Thanks Michelle. I ran into Mark Hankins on Huffington Post (I've developed a bit of a Huffington Post addiction but I'm almost over it), and I said I would do this review because I liked his perspective. The book actually IS a good, solid resource and cheap too, although seriously, it's nobody's idea of a good time.

Yes, we seem to be coming full circle on the debt business. All we need are debtor's prisons and we'll be there again. Better not say that too loud. :(