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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Debt collectors are a result of using credit or spending being one's means. There are plenty of poor people that don't buy a 60 inch TV from Best Buy and then default on the payment. A huge portion of debt collectors are collecting on things like department and electronic store credit cards. The ability to manage money (even if you don't make much of it) is not unique to just the rich. There's a big difference between being poor and being irresponsible. Most debt collectors are the result of being irresponsible.

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My father ran a budget counselling service at the local church. The vast majority of people the church was helping were low income families who were struggling to make ends meet, and were considering things like payday loans in order to simply put food on the table.

They were not irresponsible people: they had smart phones but no landline: Smartphone for $60/month versus landline for $70/month, they were making some smart decisions about where to spend their money.

The issues they did have were not being in contrl of their budgets. For the majority of these families, just learning about the envelope budget system helped them regain control. Also learning how to shop around more carefully and pay attention to whh coupons were useful and which were merely advertising helped.

The catch for low incme families can simply be not knowing how to be ruthlessly disciplined with their budget.

There is a vast gulf between, "being irresponsible," and "not knowing better ways to manage their money."

Poor people are often poor because they do not have access to the same opportunities as you: inadequate education, poor training, naiveté about wealth-building habits, and so on.

You can help make the world a better place by not perpetuating the myth that poor people are popr because they are undisciplined, lazy, stupid, or irresponsible.

Even better, find a local support group for low income families and see how you can provide assistance.

"200-600 dollar smartphone with a 60/month plan"

If I was so poor as to barely afford food I would be living either without a phone or with a $20 shit-phone on a bare bones prepaid plan. Costs hundreds less and gets the same shit done (person-to-person communication)

A smartphone can be a "shit phone." Besides being a landline replacement, it may be a person's only access to the Internet, email, and more in an age where basic jobs often require applying online.

The $60/m plan with meh smartphone is much cheaper than landline + computer + Internet.

Great points. Do these people have a computer with internet access or do they generally just rely on their phones for business?

Furthermore, I often see the homeless guys in NYC with cheap Dell laptops and Thinkpads using public Wifi to Skype their buddies. So there's that.

Laptop + free wifi is one option. Relying on phone as only computer is another.

Ah, the good ol' "if I was poor, I'd be awesome at it!" argument.

Whether or not you're right about how you'd actually behave, it's irrelevant. We can see how poor people actually do behave, and we can look to solutions that work empirically rather than philosophically.

Very good point

No, $60/month is the plan with cost of phone included. Please do not put words in my mouth.

If you were poor and unemployed, would you go without a phone, and access to email, LinkedIn and other services while you were looking for work? How do you edit those Word documents or read PDFs?

A smartphone is cheaper than a landline and desktop computer of any variety.

If you really believe that a person can look for work with just a $20 feature-phone, go try it yourself for a month as an actual experience and not a thought experiment!

Would you like to back up your statements with facts?

The major point that you're failing to argue against is this: poor people often must use loans to live their day-to-day lives.

It doesn't matter what proportion of bad debt is the result of poor people and what proportion is due to financial ignorance. The point is that poor people suffer by requiring loans.

Do some research on payday loans and car-title loans. These are some extremely exploitative lenders taking advantage of people who aren't able to make ends meet.

The last statistics I saw indicate that more than half of all bankruptcies in the U.S. were due to high medical bills. This held true regardless of insurance status. Our medical system is broken and if you have a health problem, you get hit with the double whammy of high medical bills and lowered productivity. In most cases, it has nothing to do with being irresponsible.

What I saw was that half of all bankruptcies involved some medical bills. The number actually caused by high medical bills is a lot lower.

There are things other than irresponsible spending that can result in debt collectors calling. For example, moving frequently can result in bills getting lost. I've had this happen with medical bills a few times (they sometimes don't send the bill for several months...).

Totally agree with you. It was very irresponsible for the department and electronic store to issue credit cards. They obviously didn't manage and evaluate the risks.

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