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The economic practicalities of a collector's business determine how vigorously he'll go after you. The collector must collect cheaply. He has to keep a cautious eye on how much of his company's money he's spending. If he wastes money trying to extract small sums from stubborn debtors, he's running an inefficient operation and may find himself replaced. This limitation is to the advantage of you, the debtor.

2. Ten Key Creditors, Your Strategies
1. auto loans
2. banks, finance companies, and Payday Loans
3. child support and alimony
4. credit cards
5. doctors, dentists, hospitals, HMO's
6. insurance
7. IRS
8. mortgage lenders, landlords
9. phone, utilities, internet
10. student loans

3. How Agents Try to Collect
An unsympathetic, anti-human mindset is urged upon all collector personnel by management. This is the mentality of coercion and deception. That this mentality is so contrary to the average human psyche explains the high employee turnover in the collection industry. Encouraged is a passion to get a debtor to submit to exactly what the collector wants him to do ...

4. Your Strategies for Agents
Agent or junk-debt buyer, the collector dunning you goes for the quick kill. That's the debtor he can scare into prompt submission just to make him go away. Collectors know that there is an endless supply of sucker-debtors like that. The debtsman is not one of them. Here are your strategies for fighting agents and JDB's.

5. How Lawyers Try to Collect
... If you are sued, and if the creditor prevails in court, then various legal actions may now proceed. They normally involve some type of seizure of your property. If the property seized is in the hands of any "third party," as is the money in your bank account or the wages your employer owes you for work done, the seizure is called a garnishment. The garnishment of bank accounts and wages are the most common types of collection actions, particularly wage garnishment ...

6. Your Strategies for Lawyers
... The worst thing you can do when a creditor sues you is to do nothing. If you roll over and play dead, you allow your creditor to walk all over you. Here are some ways to deal with a lawyer representing a creditor...

7. Sue The Bastards
The laws by which you, on your own, can sue the collector reside in two bodies of federal consumer-protection law known as the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA). Your enemies, the overly aggressive collectors, regard these hard-won consumer protections with contempt, and often disregard them. If your collector screws up legally in his procedure, as collectors routinely do, you can sue him in a local court using existing consumer-protection laws.

Passivity puts the average consumer on the victim side of the insidious credit-reporting surveillance system, but debtsmanship invites you to take control and to be the master of your fate ...

Historically, since there have been debtors with legs, there have been skips, and there have been skip-tracers... Today's mobile population makes skip-tracing a central challenge in collection. The technology for tracing mobile debtors as they move through a computerized world is called data-mining. The data-mining service Accurint ...

The noose of debt is tightening around your neck... Every fiber of your instinct says “flight,” but that recourse seems impossible in this high-surveillance world... In this data age, how could anyone contrive to disappear? It's easy. The Achilles heel of the industry is that it will sponge up any and all data on you, indiscriminately...

Bill-Collector Confidential is the reincarnation of the first book on bill collecting for consumers. The original was published back in the era of "consumerism" (1974) by a big New York publisher as Strategies for the Harassed Bill Payer. Like this new book, the original took a close, hard look at the bill-collecting industry, how it works day-to-day, its ethics, its tactics, its real power or lack thereof, and how you, the debtor, might exploit this knowledge to gain a strategic edge in a system wired against you. Collectors expect you to roll over and submit. "Debtsmanship" (a term coined for the original) means the knowledge, the skills, and the will to resist.

My original effort did not have the benefit of a tell-all insider like ex-bill collector Steve Katz. I was looking at the business from the outside, unprofessionally, as a debtor with some bill-collector hassles of my own. It seemed to me, though, from my own experience, that the industry was hugely dependent on bluff, on phony intimidation, and on debtors who were naive about a collector's true clout. If I looked behind the curtain, what would I find?

After a review of the scant literature in the area (which included The Poor Pay More by Caplovitz, Buy Now, Pay Later by Hillel Black, and A.M. Tannrath's How to Locate Skips and Collect), I ventured into original research and proceeded to interview all sorts of bill-collectors, both collection agents and in-house collectors. How did I penetrate their secret world? I simply introduced myself as the writer of a yet-to-be-titled book about their work. The industry was less hard-nosed back then, and most were willing to talk ...

Thirty years later, the experience a dim memory, I get a call from a Steve Katz. "Your book changed my life," he says. "I'm an ex-bill-collection agent," Steve explains. "What kind of collector was I? This kind: I knock on the lady's door. This is a walk-up apartment in the Bronx. She opens up; two kids cling to her skirt. I wave paper at her. 'If you can't pay your bills, then how can you be a responsible mother? Get your coats, kids. You're coming with me.' Of course, she runs in terror for her checkbook. I'm there to dun her for a $30 furniture installment. That's the kind of bill collector I was."

We talk on. Let's write a new book, I propose. Co-author Steve then writes a scope of revision introducing me to a new era of collection, a world I had ignored and had abstained from by personal commitment for three decades.

brave new world
Steve awakens me thirty years later to a brave new world in which all the tendencies of the 1970's have gone out of control. Historically, consumer credit began in 1856 with Isaac Singer's invention of installment buying to sell his sewing machines. He immediately tripled his business. Other businesses followed the example. Then banks expanded, beyond their traditional boundries of mortgage and business loans, into personal loans. Soon, with the advent of auto-financing, the credit concept boomed.

By the 1970's a new business culture of credit-selling had matured, driven by sophisticated advertising and marketing. Lenders sent unsolicited plastic with generous credit lines to millions by direct mail...

The consumer became accustomed to his bill-paying behavior being closely monitored, a big step in corporate privacy-intrusion. The surveillance power of credit bureaus expanded with the data-processing boom. The internet facilitated data-mining and streamlined the art of skip-tracing.

In the 1980's, all lending regulation disappeared along with all state usury laws. Credit-card corps contrived to make delinquency profitable by rip-offs like nuisance fees, default interest rates, and cross-default. Credit-repair scammers moved in on a new crop of debtors.

The consumer now adopts the risky behavior of the investment corp. Like buying on margin, the average Joe can "leverage" a fantasy lifestyle with minimum payments on his credit cards. Like the big boys, he learns how to kite money from one credit-card account to another in moments of stress. Sub-prime lenders, liberated from all regulation, show him how to leverage a fantasy home ...

As I write, the entire leveraged system, institutional and consumer, has encountered the inevitable margin call and cannot meet it ...

Meanwhile, snapping at the heels of a new generation of beleaguered debtors, is a new generation of ruthless bill-collectors and predatory junk-debt-buyers.