by Caitlin Kenney

The New York Times Magazine had a great series of articles about debt this weekend. I really enjoyed Edmund Andrews' piece on his own "Personal Credit Crisis."

Andrews writes:

I felt like a crack addict calling up my dealer. It was April 2006, and I had just reached Bob Andrews, our once and future mortgage broker, on his cellphone.

I was surprised at how glad I was to hear his voice. In his own way, Bob knew more about my messy life than almost anybody else. He never seemed judgmental or condescending. Instead, he seemed to think that money trouble and failed marriages were natural parts of life, even for good people with decent jobs. I felt relieved to have the chance to unload my problems and ask for his advice.

Andrews' description of his interactions with his mortgage broker seemed eerily similar to the same techniques being used by credit card companies that Charles Duhigg described in his piece and on the Friday podcast.

 

Here is Duhigg's description of one woman talking to a credit card representative:

And then Tracey came along. She worked for a company that today is a subsidiary of Bank of America. Tracey had talked to Tiff several times and noticed that there was a mistake on her account — an automatic payment was going to be deducted twice from her checking account. If that happened, Tiff's other checks would bounce.

"I told her, thank you so much for catching that," Tiff recalled. "And then we talked for over an hour about my problems and raising kids. She was amazing. She was so similar to me. She gave me her direct number and said that I should call her directly anytime I had any questions or just needed to talk about what was going on."

It used to be the lenders that wanted to be your friend. These days it's the collectors.