This person shall be nameless, but for the sake of this post let’s assume they are a female and let’s assume their name is Jane.
Jane is pretty typical, pretty average, got a house on an interest only mortgage but so what, it’s still a lot cheaper than renting, got a decent job, but got credit card debts and bank loans and shit and ends up with no free cash at the end of the month when everything is paid off and basic living expenses are taken out.
At this point I should state current UK law, as it stands today, December 2015, I put in the date because laws change…
In UK law debt comes in two flavours, flavour 1 is Mortgages, 2nd Mortgages, Taxes and debts to the state etc, flavour 2 is personal bank loans, credit cards, store cards and so on.
Flavour 1 can and will take your ass to court if you do not pay, and can even get you put into prison, flavour 2 cannot, they can just ring you every day and write to you every day and annoy you, and then blacklist you, you can’t go to court or prison.
So, Jane’s problem, she has spent the last 10 years living beyond her means, for values of “means” that = actual disposable income, and she is now at the point where even with historically several lifetime low interest rates, she is basically spending most of her income servicing debt and barely staying afloat.
So Jane came to me for advice, and my advice is simple.
Split the debt into the two flavours mentioned above, pay the ones that can take you to court, stop paying the others altogether, try to declare yourself bankrupt.
Doing it this way will keep you out of the courts, and keep you from ever getting another personal loan or credit card or auto loan or mortgage, which is actually a good thing, because you have already demonstrated that you are too stupid to borrow money…
Jane is taking my advice, and almost literally crapping herself at the consequences, it’s scary shit for someone who could just do even more overtime and continue to barely stay afloat, the way she has done the past year or two.
Unknown territory.
Jane lacks the mental capacity for the truth and the bigger picture, which is do this shit NOW… WHILE YOU STILL FUCKING CAN… once the floodgates open on personal debt and interest rates start to rise again *they* will simply make new laws and move the goalposts to prevent 50% of the population going bankrupt and taking 100% of the financial system with it.
She nods at me and thinks I am wise and thinks she understands what I am saying when I say to her that I rent my accommodations and they are cheap and basic, and I OWN everything else outright, nobody came come along and decide to repo my laser because I ain’t making the payments, this removing my ability to earn any money with it, and nobody can come along and repo it because it is an asset and I have any of those flavour 1 debts floating around that lead to court cases and bailiffs and asset seizure… she nods at me because it all *sounds* very sensible and practical and smart, but she has never actually seen in person what happens when debtors come calling.
Greece is currently fucked, go to the Thos Cooke website and try to book a holiday there now, all they offer is the islands, basically Rhodes, kos, crete, corfu, and the fucking Greek and Turkish holidays are only about 30 quid per person per week cheaper than the Balearics, there aren’t any winter breaks in Athens on offer, or down on the Peloponnese, where the economy is fucked and the dumb tourist gets shipped cattle class to anything but a closed all inclusive self contained resort.
Your £220 per person per week spent here on your credit card never gets to the Greek economy… know a guy in Greece who is basically being paid sweet fuck all in the hotel where he works, so he steals the tourists restaurant food and booze and fags at source from the hotel and takes it home to feed the family, he gets fuel by hiring cars for the tourists whenever he can, he gets the car for them, stops by his house, uses an electric fuel pump to siphon ALL the fuel out, then puts 5 litres back in… times are *tough*
And that whole going bankrupt thing, yeah, that legal loophole has already been closed off to him, just like his bank accounts, which did actually have some savings in them…
Jane knows none of this, she lives in a little insular bubble of her own daily life and her work and her kids and her mum and dad and so on, and to be fair to her, she was quite happy with that life.
She was quite happy to be sold interest free mortgages and second mortgages and credit cards and loans, in complete ignorance of the fact that % interest is an exponential mathematical function, because it meant she could take two holidays abroad a year and go out drinking twice a week and go out and buy shit like iphones and ipods and shoes and stuff, without even considering where the money was actually coming from, or what would happen when those interest rates go from 0.5% to 2.5% on the interest free mortgage, or what she would do at the end of the term, when you still owed precisely 0% of your “home” and faced the choice of being on the street or somehow getting another mortgage… good luck with that…
Jane is finding that taking my advice is a very rude wake up call, scary stuff, but she can kind of see that it makes sense, because she can kind of see that she is underwater and drowning like boiling a frog.
One day soon enough when Jane is one of the few people she knows, because let’s face it, most of the population nowadays lives exactly the same way Jane did, who is not being either pursued through the courts, or, perhaps worse still, BEING FORCED to accept even more onerous terms, tantamount to indentured servitude to service their debts, then she will get it, and kneel down and suck my cock in gratitude.. OK, she already does that..lol, but even more so.
I guess in many ways this is a post about seeing the writing on the wall, and leaving before you have to, just to beat the scramble, and accepting that leaving early has its own costs.
I’ve left both early and late in various things in my life, and invariably lived to regret it every time I left late, but leaving early is the role of the lonely heretic.
Not that being the lonely heretic is anything new to me, but I have this funny peculiarity about me, that I can think a thing and think a thing and think a thing, and all it takes is one well crafted logical question or statement or argument, and I will stop, re-examine that thing, and then change my mind completely.
By way of example;
I’m involved in a current technical discussion on one of the HD forums, now I wasn’t born on a panhead, but on the other hand I’m not a complete newb, I do have a mechanical engineering background, I have been a biker all my adult life, I have owned a few, and the current ride is below, which is on top as the discussion was about stage kits on a twinkie motor..
So, just to be clear hear “twinkie” is shorthand for the (current model) twin cam engine, which came after the evo(lution) engine, which came after the shovel engine…. and “stage” kits are stage 1 through 5, where one is a fairly mild warm over and 5 is race, eg drag strip.
At stages 2 and 3 and 4 they go big bore, my ride was an ’02 model and came from the factory with the 88 inch engine, the previous / original owner (I’m the 2nd) rode it for about 8,000 miles and decided to throw a lot of money at it, and went straight for the 103 inch stage 4 kit, though 103 and 110 inch is now standard on factory new, but they are stage 0… so essentially you can look at the HD SE (screamin eagle) stage kits as development stuff, whatever is a stage kit now (like the 103 motor in ’04) becomes standard equipment some years down the line, but for all that the SE stage kits up to and including stage 4 (stage 5 is not road legal anyway) do not void the warranty.
One thing the harley work is great for is aftermarket parts, and while most content themselves with having a choice of 199 different rear view mirrors all based up a skeletal hand, there are also motor / transmission mods, so you can go out today and buy an S&S 124″ motor and drop it straight in.
Anyway, back to the plot.
I’m a heretic on the HD forums, because I do not subscribe to the monty python esque popular people’s front of judea – splitters – cliques that inhabit that aftermarket tuning world, all of whom pretty much universally deride the “factory” tuning options such as the SE stage kits, and the one thing that unites them is the claim that you can get more for less.
More in this case is rear wheel bhp and torque as measured on the dyno.
I being a heretic take the opposite view, I know my ride on a good day with cool damp air and good fuel and so on will give 120/120, eg 120 bhp and 120 ft lb, that’s on a dyno, but being a heretic my opinion is that the only dyno that means anything is the road.
On the road it’s still a hoggly dogglyson, which means that almost everything else on the road that is not a towing vehicle has better handling characteristics, really, if you want handling buy a sportbike, if you want bhp and top speed buy a hayabusa or similar…. yeah, I ride HD, that doesn’t mean I have to lie and make excuses and deny their many shortcomings… do that and nobody will trust or believe you when you talk about the positives.
The positives are that in anything even approaching a straight line, basically nothing can stay with it, and it’s effortless, just crack the throttle open, and in top at around 65 it starts to come on cam and goes from being “quite pokey, loads or torque, just roll it on” to “holy fuck” and it’s just like *everything* else just did an emergency stop with ABS, and you just ate another millimetre of tread off the rear tyre, at all other sane speeds and engine rpm it’s loud and proud and has the same effect as an AK wielding terrorist in Paris, road users just make way, 2 4 6 8 12 or 16 wheels, they make way.
The problem ain’t torque, it’s traction.
Stage iv “announces” itself on the streets.
ain’t no “potato potato” there (not me or my bike in the clip btw)
But anyway, in the gospel according to all these cliques, this doesn’t matter, it ain’t shit for one reason and one reason only, it’s a “factory” kit.
Course, that is the *only* reason that is *not* given when people ask about the HD SE stage kits, it’s all “you can get more for less” and all that jazz…
This “the only thing that is not stated aloud is the actual truth” is very similar to the economic / financial situation here, not to mention the political one, still waiting for the cockpit voice recordings from the malaysian plane downed over ukraine…
The actual financial truth is that most people like Jane, and there are a *lot* of them out there, all it takes is simple mathematics to prove that they can only service their debts as long as interest rates remain close to zero, and that they can never repay them.
Simple mathematics also shows that if the majority of these people are permitted to follow the path Jane is now embarking upon, it will totally collapse the economy and banking sector, MANY TIMES OVER…
… therefore, the majority of people like Jane will not be permitted to follow the path Jane is now embarking on.
I personally have no idea what measures will be taken to preserve the status quo, but again, simple maths tells me that they are going to be one hell of a lot less pleasant than the path Jane is taking, because *they* are not going to get off the hook, I do not need to know what that hook is or how it will be baited.
I do not need to shove a cactus up my ass to know it will be extremely painful and unpleasant.
But as the factory tuned HD kits show, this whole thing does not rely on people being blinkered about financial products ONLY, rather it is people being blinkered to whole attitudes, and financial products just happen to fall into that sphere of blindness, quite deliberately and by design of course.
Without exception, every single one of the HD experts denigrating the factory tuned kits has a financial interest in doing so, just like the skank ho ex’s legal team and social services, follow the fucking money, if the factory kits are just as good (arguably better as they do not invalidate the warranty) then all the independents, who have moved away from being mere independent motorcycle mechanics, and morphed into independent dyno / tuning experts, would be out a fucking job, because their hourly labour rates and no cheaper than the dealership, and if you are buying a factory kit and cannot do your own work then you may as well have it done at the stealership, at least they have to give and back up the factory warranty…
It’s the same in the financial world, the laser business having gotten to the point where I can quit the day job and run it as a proper company, I now have Barclaycard ringing me and asking if they can come visit me in my premises to talk about me taking card payments, and when I said yeah man, I know all about that shit, and I can’t justify the monthly chip and pin machine rental and the 1.5% commission on all transactions when all of my customers to date are quite happy to get a pro forma and e-bank the money so I get it ten minutes later, you know what they said?
The guy who will come to see you is there to make the deal, there are no lines in the sand, there is no minimum monthly rental or commission…
Come on down, I said…
Not being born yesterday, I’ll want a new barclays account to go with it, and e-banking on that account, and any monies taken in are going to get transferred out of that account and that bank the same day.
Same reason I’ll pay any asshole by standing order, which puts ME in control of my account, and nobody by direct debit, which puts THEM in control of my account, and the very few companies I simply cannot avoid direct debit to do business with like my mobile phone and my broadband and my insurance, well, I have a separate account for that, one that has just enough paid in every month to cover them all.
I’ll be the first one to leave the party, not the last, only find I’ve been locked in, and then the main act starts….