Bright House misleading consumers with their interest rate?

pelirocco

nearlyrich wrote: »

If people want to spend money they don't have on things they probably don't need you can't blame a company for making the most of it. We walk past a Brighthouse regularly and they have a washer in the window for almost £600 (Before the high interest rate) I have a good job and savings and I would be very hard pressed to spend £300 on a washer.

Plus I would suspect a high % of their customers are at high risk of defaulting on their payments

Sinhanada

Brighthouse certainly do charge a lot more for their products in exactly the same way that a lot of companies do when dealing with the sub prime market. They provide a weekly payment service in much the same way of companies like Shopacheque, pay per view etc. The products cost a lot more than an average high street retailer, but this again is due to their pay weekly options.

Add in the interest and if people could get credit at affordable rates then they wouldn't be shopping at Brighthouse in exactly the same way that people wouldn't use Pay Day Loans.

Yes it's extortionate, but it's legal.

The choice is simple - save for it if you can...

tomtontom

iolanthe07 wrote: »

Yeah - I know. But you're asssuming everyone has your intelligence and forethought. A lot of poor people don't really think things through, don't understand the maths of interest rates or have any understanding of budgeting, and live from day to day. You only need to have a look at the posts on the DFW board to see how hopeless some people's situations are, even if often it is their own fault. I just think sometimes on this board we (and I include myself) lack empathy with those who are living on very low incomes and whose lives are pretty crap.

You are confusing being poor with being of low intelligence. The two are not the same thing!

BillJones

tomtontom wrote: »

You are confusing being poor with being of low intelligence. The two are not the same thing!

There's probably a positive correlation, though.

bigadaj

BillJones wrote: »

No, that's not correct. The top 1% of earners pay 30% of all income taxes, and most are in the top 1% because they made decisions such as staying on at school, delaying having children, and planning out their career.

Do you genuinely believe that higher earners are not paying higher taxes? Where do you get thse weird ideas from?

The majority of high earners still gain that position by inheritance, connections or both.

Social mobility has decreased radically in the uk over the last twenty or thirty years, after increasing radically for the generation before that. Off topic but a comment that I thought worth making for balance.

BillJones

bigadaj wrote: »

The majority of high earners still gain that position by inheritance, connections or both.

Do you have any evidence for that view? I ask because I work among very high earners (high six-figure to seven figures in GBP), and none of them got here by "connections" other than those they made in work. Of my many college frends who are also high-earners, only one is in his family business, with all the rest having applied to graduate training programmes in companies where they had no "in".

I'd be interested to see the source of your figures, when it is so at odds with my experience.

wannabe_credit_free

There are plenty of people with high intelligence, who are complete idiots when it comes to money. My husband is one of them and I'm the one having to rein him in and sort out the mess...:mad:

Its only taken him 40 years to finally see sense....:T

bigadaj

BillJones wrote: »

Do you have any evidence for that view? I ask because I work among very high earners (high six-figure to seven figures in GBP), and none of them got here by "connections" other than those they made in work. Of my many college frends who are also high-earners, only one is in his family business, with all the rest having applied to graduate training programmes in companies where they had no "in".

I'd be interested to see the source of your figures, when it is so at odds with my experience.

It's based on my experiences. I've done a fair bit of due diligence for mergers and acquisitions clients, and the background of the guys I've met has been very much public school and family connections. Nice blokes but nothing special.

My partner heads up a business for a guy who has several companies, net worth £100-150 million. He's actually fairly self made from an accountancy background, but he's put his kids into positions and again they are nice enough but not the sharpest tools. She has also met their friends, one young chap was apparently a lovely lad but had been sacked a couple of times by a large banking group, and only reinstated when his grandfather applied some pressure.

More specifically I think your original quote was misguided. Many people will get into positions of comfort and become wealthy through hard work, education etc. you specifically used the top 1% as an example, and the qualities you describe are less relevant at this level. If you'd said something like the top 10% contribute 80% of taxes that would have been more relevant to your argument.

Indeed at the top 1% level then you are looking at many who might be entrepreneurs, often not hugely educated like Branson and Philip green, many people in sport, entertainment and similar areas.

BillJones

bigadaj wrote: »

It's based on my experiences. I've done a fair bit of due diligence for mergers and acquisitions clients, and the background of the guys I've met has been very much public school and family connections. Nice blokes but nothing special.

OK, so you've not any actual figures.

As I said, I work at the top end, and your assertions just don't match the reality that I've seen here, or among college friends. It's not statistically plausible that these thousands of data points are all outliers.

bigadaj

BillJones wrote: »

OK, so you've not any actual figures.

As I said, I work at the top end, and your assertions just don't match the reality that I've seen here, or among college friends. It's not statistically plausible that these thousands of data points are all outliers.

Neither have you, that's also noted.

The lack of social mobility in Britain has become extreme again, you're obviously like me a product of the eighties or early nineties. Social mobility in erased from the fifties through to teh nineties, but in the last fifteen or twenty years has diminished dramatically. More Etonians and Oxbridge in the cabinet than in balfours cabinet over a hundred years ago. Ironically the expansion of the education system such that we now have almost a majority of kids on degree courses has decreased this, larger numbers to choose from means that connections and also knowledge of systems means that fewer people from the lower end of society have opportunities, as a degree becomes easier to achieve.

I'd be interested even in some quantification of your anecdotal evidence as I've noted a high density of people from privileged backgrounds in financial servcies in general. None of my contemporaries from imperial in the eighties are in the city as far as I'm aware, though there are a few that are in accountancy in london.

I'm interested in why you post on the loans board, as you have pointed out you apparently have no need for loans and aren't sympathetic to those that do, in which case the most generous interpretation I can think of is schadenfreude.