Deadbeats

Reading stories about deadbeats gets my blood up, as James Cromwell would say in L.A. Confidential. Reading stories about professional deadbeats is practically a cardiac test for me.

FOCUS: Discuss the loser that is the above professional deadbeat.

ALT FOCUS: Discuss your experiences with deadbeats. Did they get the better of you, or did you, uh, beat them dead?

 

If he had AIDS, he'd be the hero of a musical.

As for deadbeats I've dealt with, and yeah, I see the irony, shut up...

Freaking College Humor. Getting money from them is like getting money from ...me. When you submit an article, you get paid based on traffic. You need at least 100k hits to get anything, and it caps at 250k hits. But, there's no way to check the total number of hits an article gets, so it's just an honor system. StumbledUpon though, does track unique visitors, and an article I wrote last year got 267k hits just from Stumbled. It took a few e-mails to get them to acknowledge that they owed me some money for it, but that was back in March, and I still haven't seen a check. Comparing the number of Facebook likes on that article to some other ones, it's like they owe me for multiple articles, but I have no way to know for sure.

And yet, I keep writing for them. Maybe I'm naive, but I think they're more disorganized or understaffed than consciously deadbeats. I should probably start looking for a more reliable outlet, but the exposure from CH is probably worth more than the actual payment.

Back when I was writing for Bitter Lawyer, it took forever to get the owner to pay me what he owed for articles. I guess he was too busy getting Dark Blue canceled. $100 or $200 doesn't seem like much, but that can buy a whole lot of scotch. Right now I'm just really hoping the last company I freelanced for isn't late on the check. Got $605 due in a week, and another $550 a few weeks later.

 

In college I ran a hockey camp for kids during spring break. I hated it, and it was a complete waste of my vacation, but I needed the cash. Buddy that ran the hockey school payed me by cheque at the end of the week and I didn't try to cash it until I got back to school (four hours away). It took me months to get that cash, because he kept telling me 'the cheque was in the mail.'

Balls. Do you know how many drinks $500 can buy you when you're a poor, struggling student?! So I just whored out my tits for the remainder of the semester for free drinks instead. Sorry Mom. Sorry God!

 

This stuff, indeed, gets my blood up. The shit that people like this do has wide ranging effects that goes well beyond the thievery they commit (which is not insubstantial in itself). He's tying up court time which could be better served hearing cases with actual merit. He's costing the public money in the costs of running court as well. Worse, he's not even paying for the privilege of wasting the court time because of the dispensation he's got.

Then, there's the loss of income for the landlord, and the flow on potential damage to their credit rating if the house is financed. I don't know if you have landlord's insurance there as standard, but here (at least) it only covers a part of the lost rent. There's the damage they invariable cause to houses for which there's no recompense (note the fire). Then there's the legal fees the landlord incurs, and time and effort spent.

Added to all of that, there's the bad will stories like this generate for other tenants which make things unnecessarily hard. There's probably a dozen other factors I can't think of now. All because some fuckwit thinks it's okay not to live up to his responsibilities. Fuck them.

ALT FOCUS: Unfortunately, dealing with deadbeats is a professional hazard for me. I'm the end of the line for the complaints process in our organisation, so I usually end up with the hardcore delinquents. People will do and say just about anything out of paying their loans or to get their credit record expunged. Some of the more notable ones I've had over the years:

- We were chasing a guy to repossess his car. Rather than give it up, he called us to say that he'd buried the car on a farm somewhere near Hervey Bay and that we'd never find it.
- I had a woman on the phone last week who swore black and blue that she'd hadn't taken out a second loan with us, that she had a notarised (equivalent) statutory declaration from her uncle that she hadn't, that she was going to take us to the ombudsman and her solicitor was filing court process against us. I got the file and told her that not only did I have her original signature in front of me on the loan documents, but also bank transfer confirmation of the funds going into her account as it was an urgent transfer.
- One guy, last week, was sued and we had judgment awarded against him because he didn't file a defence. He turned up to the enforcement hearing with a solicitor from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service and got the judge to agree to an open ended stay of proceedings so he could file a motion to get judgment overruled. Now we have to sit and wait, with no time frame, while he gets special treatment that is generally only allowed in cases of procedural breach.
- Ages ago, a debtor was refusing to give up his car for repossession because, and this is a direct quote, "I think I've paid back enough". He also claimed he needed his car to drive his family to church as he was a very religious man. I told him that was funny, considering I'd heard conversations between him and my female staff where he abused and swore at them. Not a very Christian way to conduct himself.
- Another guy paid back the principal and stopped paying, refusing to pay another cent. His reasoning was that "he could go down to the bank and get the money cheaper, so he shouldn't have to pay us anything more."

Fucking thieving, irresponsible deadbeats, the lot of them.

 

I suppose I have played the role of a deadbeat myself.

In the second year of university when we first moved in we got an electricity bill for £60 the first day we moved in. It was obviously the outstanding balance from the previous year and so we just ignored. We then ignored each subsequent bill and by the end of the year it was a few hundred quid. I then skipped out on my tenancy a month before it was due to end without paying the last months rent.

However when I moved in I deliberately kept making up excuses why I couldn't come down to fill out paperwork, I just paid each months rent one month in advance, I don't think the landlady even knew my last name. I didn't feel particually guilty about it though as she got to keep my security deposit (one months rent) and private property is theft and all that.

 

This guy looks like a pretty big asshole, however given that I'm willing to bet that the amount of professional slumlords outnumber professional deadbeats like this guy on a scale of 100-1 or so, I can't conjure up too much sympathy for the landlords in this case. Yeah it's bullshit if they're running clean operations but if they want to look for a place to blame they can look to their unscruplous collegues for enabling this guy's endless litigation.

Focus: When I first started my job at my current employer doing the accounts payable was one of my duties. The previous finance director had mismanaged things so badly that we were almost forced to close our doors despite having a sound revenue model (at one point our outstanding receivables were worth nearly 75% of entire annual budget). I spent the first couple of months playing the "who can I pay?" game when it came time to cut the checks to our creditors and vendors every week. Needless to say I heard from the collections departments from the vendors at the bottom of the priority list quite often.

I've never had to deal with collections agents for personal debts but for the most part the ones I dealt with were polite and professional and really were pretty easy to deal with. I'd tell them how much we could pay and when I'd send a check - providing them with a check number and date - and they'd be satisfied.

 

Our company deals exclusively with business owners of companies profitable enough to warrant retirement benefits and municipalities, so non-payment hasn't really been an issue. Lately though there are a few towns that haven't paid us despite receiving the bill over six months ago, most of them keep saying they're still in the approval stage or whatever (despite it being approved before we even started doing the work).

One of the guys is just ignoring us presumably hoping the problem will go away. These aren't small time flunkies either, we're talking the treasurer or finance director for the towns trying to dodge bills. We're not even sure what to do, can you put the government in collections? We hate to do it, but we'll probably start charging up front if this continues.

The hilarious thing is that these are towns that are paying $30+ million dollars a year IN PAYROLL ALONE, yet are dodging bills less than ten grand.

 

I haven't paid a fine that I got in Berlin 2006.

I was on the subway going to a test for school. It was my first time on the subway there, and I had noticed that there was a ticket option for "Schuler" which is like a student. It was only 40 cents cheaper, but hey, 40 cents is 40 cents.

So I bought the ticket, and ticket inspectors hopped on at one station, and looked at my ticket, and noticed something was amiss. They pointed out that Schuler didn't mean University student, but rather a school kid. Whoops, my mistake I realized. Well, it is my first couple days here, and I haven't got the system down, and it is only 40 cents I told them.

They didn't care, and they took me off the train and wrote me a ticket for 40 Euro.

Fuck that I thought, I am not paying it, and threw it out.

I kept getting notices in the mail of my need to pay the fine. By the time I left in 2007 I owed about 600 Euro. If we extrapolate those numbers I probably owe about 1,000,000 Euro.

I bet my passport is flagged.

 

Shee-it, deadbeats? I manage a low income apartment complex. Subsidized housing is deadbeat central. I will give this some thought, but here is one that just happened recently.

On Friday I went to court for an eviction on a tenant who pays no rent. She actually gets a little money back every month to help pay her electric bill. I was evicting her, because either her or her friends party/fight all the damn time (hell, I had the cops come out last Monday night and one of her guests was outside fighting with his girlfriend at 5:00 am on the day of court) She of course didn't think this was her fault, because it was her friends and not her, so I should have just banned those people from the property (instead of her just not fucking inviting them over).

Without bogging down in details the judge gave her two more weeks (because we didn't give her enough time to move out initially), so it is sort of a half win. 2 weeks is a lot of time for her, her half-wit friends, and her ex-con brother (who has been living there since he got out of the pokey a couple weeks ago) to cause a lot of trouble. I was afraid we wouldn't even get the judgment, because she wasn't behind on rent and it was a non-material issue, so I can't complain too much.

 

Riding the ambulance in a busy area has taught me a whole lot, namely just how many fucking deadbeats are out there. Hopefully this doesn't cross any of the politics rules on this board.
First, I would say that about 90% of the patients I run have no health insurance. I doubt this speaks for the general population, because the ones with health insurance are generally the ones who are most afraid to call 911, and when someone does have insurance, they are generally having a real emergency. The ones with no insurance are usually some bullshit, like a hurting foot, or a headache, or they just want a free taxi ride to the hospital so they can try to weasel meds out of doctors.
Now if you really can't afford insurance, that's one thing. But I routinely run people wearing NICE shoes/watches/clothes, etc. who have no insurance to speak of. I even ran one dude who had a car accident (his fault), and as we strapped him to a backboard, the police told us that they busted him just last week for driving without a license or insurance. I'm absolutely sure he told us he had back pain (he barely spoke English) just so he could go to the hospital instead of jail. Cops sat a nice stack of tickets (seven of them I think) on his chest while he was on the backboard. Because of course someone so trustworthy is going to appear in court and pay fines.

Little off topic, but some general advice regarding ambulances/911 services: While I run a ton of people who call us like we are a taxi service, there are plenty of people out there who are afraid to call. If you have an emergency, pick up the phone. I'm always happy to get out of bed to help an old man/woman who's fallen down. I'm always unhappy to get out of bed for some crackhead who wants drugs at the hospital.

 

Related: Rudius Media.

Too soon?

 

Fuck what a timely thread.

Times are tough but people are also stupid with their budgets. I now have 6 cars in hock for non-payment of their storage fees. Two guys are YEARS into the red. The other four are about a year behind. A couple guys are laid off and I know will pay eventually, two guys are spending money on other shit and dodging me for what they owe.

Most recently I had a falling out with a good friend because his cheapskate/deadbeat ways were out of hand. It was a running joke that his wallet was always empty and that he was the king of the "I owe you one". He owes me a couple grand but I finally lost my shit because he was stiffing a group on the bill. He and I drove to the bar together and when we were leaving he told me he'd take care of what we owed. I was surprised.

There were ten of us on the bill and everyone else was staying. He had three mixed drinks, I had four beers. He was trying to hand one of our friends a $20 to cover the two of us. No way it covered us. I called him on it and he got pissed. Haven't spoken since.

 

One of my coworkers had to call an ambulance from her home (some sort of clot in her leg, maybe a deep vein thrombosis, don't recall). She didn't have insurance, so the EMTs recorded her as being homeless, which meant the bill went to the city.

I guess she's a deadbeat, but the only reason she didn't have insurance was because our firm put new employees on a 3 month probation period, and since you can always be fired at will it doesn't really mean anything except that the firm saves a few bucks by not paying for your insurance. I guess they're kinda deadbeats too. We also had a lot of deadbeat clients which screwed up the firm's cashflow (pay your bills Hugo!).

 

The thing that astonishes me about the professional deadbeat in the first article is that here, with his level of knowledge about the law as it applies to rental tennants, he could make a comfortable income for substantially less work as an advisor for a residential tennancy authority (the consumer representative group) where he'd just be the same asshole on other people's behalf and call it championing the little guy.

I am in all probability a deadbeat. I had some pretty epic money problems and <insert excuse here> I don't think it was entirely my fault - but the reality is I put myself in a position where a few things that were out of my control could just destroy my entire financial situation, and that was incredibly stupid. I'm working through clearing the debts now, and it's progressing I guess. But can't even stomach the idea of a loan at the moment. The idea of accepting credit, or even a contract for service that extends further than my next pay cheque is just repulsive. The few things I still have on post paid arrangements are tiny costs, and I'm only persisting with them because I couldn't find a provider who'd provide the same service on a prepay/no contract basis.

I know on an intellectual level - responsible use of credit is reasonable and sometimes financially responsible - but I can't imagine ever actually wanting to take out a loan for something again. I mean I imagine one day I'll want to buy another house - but right now, I just can't stomach the thought. Constantly feeling like a deadbeat and trying to tell the people who you owe money that you just don't have it, fucking sucks.

 

One of the best lessons my dad ever taught me (that actually stuck with me, unlike most shit) was to never lend money to a friend unless you didn't care if you saw the money again or not. Of course, making that judgment has as much to do with the friend as it does with the money.

That said, I tend to be pretty loose with cash. Worrying about a small amount of money between friends has always seemed nuts to me. Generally speaking, it all works out one way or another. And you don't want to be that guy who keeps track of how much orange juice is left in his bottle in the fridge or the guy who wants to pay for only precisely what he ordered at a big group meal. Likewise, if you're the guy that always comes up short, your friends will know that too, with a similar loss of face.

Professional dickery like that in the OP is on a totally different level. Mark Newton clearly has no respect for anything, and deserves absolutely nothing in life, which is almost certainly what he has if he spends all his time creating squalor to bolster his bullshit legal defense.