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Here's why the banks win: Based on the universally applied 29.9% default rate that Bonadio was paying on his credit card debt, it would have taken forty-four years of minimum monthly repayments to pay back the $54,000 total. By then he would have paid an additional $130,000 in interest.

In contrast, because of the front-loading effect of the interest paid when the loan was at its largest, the banks would have earned back the entire amount in just three and half years. What the bank desperately wants to avoid is a six-month cut-off date. If payments aren't received by then, it must write off the entire loan on its balance sheet, recognize the loss, and then fight with other unsecured creditors over what could be a measly payout from a drawn-out bankruptcy. That's why it resorts to the telephone equivalent of saturation bombing during the first ninety days.

"They know what's going to drive you nuts and that you are going to give them $60 just to shut the phone up," said Bonadio. If just one of those calls hits its target and prompts a minimum payment, the clock kicks back to six months and the bank is in the clear. But if the customer reaches the fourth month with no payment, the game changes. Out of the blue, a settlement letter will arrive from the bank, offering to accept perhaps 50 or 60 cents on the dollar. The savvy debtor will politely demand something more generous. And the bank, weighing the cost of a lower settlement against that of a charge-off, will routinely concede. In Bonadio's case, he settled with Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America for an average 31 percent of the total, a saving of $37,379. And while his course of action initially trashed his credit rating, the subsequent improvement in his overall finances later prompted it to rise.

Most debtors aren't like Bonadio, though. Most cave in to the banks' phone calls and make their overdue payments. Indeed, according to the moral code by which most of us live by, that should be the right thing to do.

But the financial crisis makes the ethics less clear cut.

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Bonadio is one of the few who outwitted the system. Why? Not because of his steely resolve, but thanks to a device that the Consumer Recovery Network advised him to purchase: a caller ID machine with ring controller. With that little box, he could program the phone not to ring whenever calls came from a number associated with one of the banks' debt collectors. The machine, he says, kept him sane. It also gave him the detachment and time to watch how the banks approached problems such as his.

The machine's call log captured the entire combative process through which the banks fight to get an insolvent debtor to make a payment until it can't afford to play that cynical game any longer. That perspective embittered Bonadio.

"I'm not a religious person," he said, "but it is as if Satan said, 'I want to be on earth,' and God asked him, 'What are you going to be?' And he said, 'I'm going to be a bank.' "

Read more here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-casey/debt-collector-harassment_b_1588197.html

I'm posting this in the hope that it will help someone else to escape.

BAH!

Interesting read Blue thanks for posting