Reckless Lenders

Gaz1971

Does anyone else feel that the lenders are as much to blame for their debt as they are themselves? Since I notified my card companies I was broke 6 weeks ago they have bombarded me with offers of loans and credit cards. During my time with the cards they would always keep upping the credit limit even though I was only paying the minimum payment each month and obviously stretched to my limit. Its a fair point when people say 'Well you shouldnt spend it' but I feel its also a case of it shouldnt be so easy to get the credit in the first place

Richard_S

Gaz1971 wrote: »

Does anyone else feel that the lenders are as much to blame for their debt as they are themselves? Since I notified my card companies I was broke 6 weeks ago they have bombarded me with offers of loans and credit cards. During my time with the cards they would always keep upping the credit limit even though I was only paying the minimum payment each month and obviously stretched to my limit. Its a fair point when people say 'Well you shouldnt spend it' but I feel its also a case of it shouldnt be so easy to get the credit in the first place

Hi Gaz,

It's a 50/50 split; you can't have a reckless borrower without having a reckless lender; tis just a fact of life.

Doesn't change anything, and won't until the dynamics of the system chage; whether that'll be a good or bad thing only time will tell.

Richard

ManAtHome

But they bombard almost everyone with offers and increase credit limits whether you need it or not. You're right that it shouldn't be so easy, but still your choice whether to go for it or not...

PasturesNew

If lenders said no to most borrowers, the borrowers would find a way to get the money from somewhere. They'd just keep trying, possibly even lying on forms, to get the money they want.

What next.... should cake shops stop selling things to fat people?

Gaz1971

As we all see on this forum, there are many of us who are weak and give into temptation, that temptation shouldnt be shoved under our noses constantly.

Richard_S

PasturesNew wrote: »

If lenders said no to most borrowers, the borrowers would find a way to get the money from somewhere. They'd just keep trying, possibly even lying on forms, to get the money they want.

What next.... should cake shops stop selling things to fat people?

Maybe if lenders said no, borrowers would spend less, and where would that leave "10years of continuous growth in the economy":rolleyes:

If cake shops said no, it would probably reduce the average girth of the nation, but cake shops would go out of business.:D

Richard_S

Gaz1971 wrote: »

As we all see on this forum, there are many of us who are weak and give into temptation, that temptation shouldnt be shoved under our noses constantly.

I woudn't mind somebody shoving a credit card up my nose at the moment Gaz, it would make my next trip abroad a lot easier.:D

Gaz1971

And send you on a trip to the bankruptcy court:rotfl:

ManAtHome

Richard_S wrote: »

Maybe if lenders said no, borrowers would spend less, and where would that leave "10years of continuous growth in the economy"

lol - I think they're gutless greedy b*astards as well, unfortunately only one of the grasping to$$ers dumped in time (no doubt advised by his grasping OH).

wherediditallgo

I readily accept that I've made some foolish financial decisions in my time, decisions that were sometimes based more on desperation than good sense. However if lenders hadn't been so willing to lend to me either at the beginning or when I was looking for ways to resolve my debt problems, my debts wouldn't have got as high as they did. There's at least one unsecured loan, taken out specifically to consolidate debts, that wouldn't have happened but the fact that I got the paperwork to sign three days after spending less than 10 minutes talking to someone on the 'phone. Perhaps if the loan had been on the basis that I wouldn't see the money for 28 days instead of it going into my account immediately, I'd have thought harder about what I was doing or would have looked harder for another solution.

That said, no access to the greater finance doesn't mean I wouldn't have still gone BR in the end. My earnings were less then too, & who's to say what effect having to deal with more creditors rather than the fewer consolidated ones would have had on me then?

cinnabar

PasturesNew wrote: »

If lenders said no to most borrowers, the borrowers would find a way to get the money from somewhere. They'd just keep trying, possibly even lying on forms, to get the money they want.

That's probably true, but speaking from experience, I never once lied on an application form, all my creditors knew exactly how little I earned. I take responsibility for applying for credit and for not saying no to credit limit increases, but I honestly thought that if the bank was offering me the credit, they thought I could manage it. Naive, very.
The bank I had my student account with actually increased the limit of my credit card to 8 grand while I was a student - they knew my financial position very well. I took a graduate loan out to pay that off (for the record I didn't use the whole limit!), struggled a year later and went to them for help - their solution? another loan, on top of the first, that meant they were getting 50% of my wages each month.

I do think that somewhere along the line the bank should have said, right, you're obviously not managing very well, so we're not going to lend you any more. But the staff are on high targets and honestly I think many if not most of them think about their targets more than whether or not you can really afford to borrow the money - I've worked in a bank for the past few years and have seen the pressure sales staff are put under! I'm not even sales staff but there is enormous pressure on me to generate sales leads and I'm constantly badgered to approach people to talk about getting loans, credit cards etc.

Having seen first hand how pushy banks expect their staff to be when selling credit, I can't say I'm terribly sympathetic to them when some customers can't pay it back. Obviously I don't think anyone should deliberately borrow money with the intention of not paying it back, and I do realise that some people being unable to pay puts the interest rates on borrowing up for everyone else (or at least that's what I've been led to believe!) but the banks aren't the ones losing out in all this.