You hit the nail on the head!

So what did you do? There's a certain amount of satisfaction in pointing out to a deadbeat what's wrong with his life, but not $350 a month worth. A long time ago I had to have some non-paying renters evicted from my first rental house, and more recently I got a good deal of experience with evictions at an apartment complex I worked at. Dead loss, as far as I can tell. Our legal system, particularly the civil law side, isn't set up to protect those who follow the rules from those who don't. This was hammered home for me when I learned that the quasi-legal definition of "judgement proof" is a person who has nothing to lose, nothing to give up, nothing that can be taken to settle claims against him or her. If you do have something to lose, however, you're really a prisoner to the system (See T_Bone's posting and the responses concerning property taxation abuses below for one example.) You have to play by the rules and take your lumps. You'll lose but you won't lose everything. Go outside the rules a little bit though (throw a deadbeat renter's goods out into the yard, injure an unarmed burglar in your house, grab a minor who's trying to flee after being caught vandalizing your property) and you're likely to lose everything.

Why is it that we productive citizens in a country which is a democracy feel so much like the helpless subjects of a lunatic feudal system? I know that it's not as bad as it could be, but is that actually a high enough standard? How much comfort, much less pride, should we take in the fact that our country's motto today could be, "America---not the worst country ever"? Didn't we used to aspire to a higher standard than that?

All the best, Stan

So...their deal was, send us your monthly payments you were paying to your debtors. We keep your money in our account.....until you are past 90 days due on ALL your debt payments, then they try and get the companies you owe money to to settle for half the outstanding debt or something like that....they tell you not to talk to the credit card companies or auto loan companies if they call you, just refer them to this 'get out of debt company' - of course they want you to do that, otherwise you find out they are HOLDING YOUR MONEY, and not paying YOUR PAYMENTS, and RUINING YOUR CREDIT while they make a profit.

It's a real quick way to ruin your credit rating. She never did get her money back from those folks and ended up having a minor hiccup on her credit report before we figured out what they were doing. We had to make up all the back payments real quick to get things back on track.

Non profit credit COUNSELING services are valuable, same as watching closely what you are spending your money on.